A Tribute To

Abstract

Roger F. Harrington was born in Buffalo, NY, USA, on December 24, 1925. He attended the public schools in that city and enrolled in the undergraduate program in Electrical Engineering at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY in 1943. His education was interrupted from 1944 to 1946 for service in the U.S. Navy during World War II as an Electronics Technician and as an Instructor at the U.S. Naval Radio Materiel School, Dearborn, MI. He returned to Syracuse University after the war and earned the B.S. degree in 1948 and the M.S. in 1950, both in electrical engineering. From 1948 to 1950 he was employed as an Instructor and Research Assistant at Syracuse University. In 1950 he began his studies for the Ph.D. degree at The Ohio State University, Columbus, obtaining the degree in August 1952. The title of his dissertation is “Solution to some electromagnetic boundary value problems”. Victor H. Rumsey was his dissertation advisor. The title page of Dr. Harrington’s dissertation is shown in Figure 1. From 1952 to 1994, he held an appointment on the professorial staff at Syracuse University. Next, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Arizona in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. At the time of this writing, he was living with a daughter, Judy, in Wheaton, IL. Dr. Harrington’s principal areas of research are electromagnetic theory and applied mathematics. During the period 1954 to 1958, Dr. Harrington undertook several different sponsored research projects. The first of these was on aperture antennas for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Several basic formulas for radiation from aperture antennas in cylindrical bodies were derived and applied during this project. The second contract, done for the U.S. Air Force of Scientific Research, was an investigation of wave propagation in gyrotropic media. In this work an extended reciprocity principle was developed for such nonreciprocal media. The third contract, performed under a subcontract from the General Electric Company, was a study of the near-zone fields of antennas. This work resulted in the establishment of some fundamental limits to the performance of antennas. Concurrent with the above work, Dr. Harrington wrote his first book, Introduction to Electromagnetic Engineering, which was published by McGraw-Hill in 1958 and reprinted by Dover in 2003. This book is somewhat unconventional in that it appeals to an electrical engineer’s knowledge of circuit theory to establish the equations of electromagnetic theory. The book was used at a number of schools in the United States and abroad as a text for undergraduate and first-year graduate courses. At about the same time, Dr. Harrington wrote his second book, Time-Harmonic Electromagnetic Fields, published by McGraw-Hill in 1961 and reprinted in 2001 by Wiley-IEEE Press. “Time-Harmonic-Electromagnetic Fields”, which is one of the most significant works in electromagnetic theory and applications, has been adopted extensively as a graduate-level text throughout the world. During the writing of