[1]

On the variational aspects of the moment method

Jack H. Richmond, Life Fellow, IEEE

From 1940 to 1946 and from 1950 to 1951 he served in the U.S. Navy as Chief Electronics Technician. Since 1952 he has been engaged in research on antennas and scattering at the Electroscience Laboratory, The Ohio State University. Now a Professor Emeritus, he has served on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering since 1955.

Dr. Richmond is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, Pi Mu Epsilon and Eta Kappa Nu(,). He was awarded the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984 through the Antennas and Propagation Society, and George Sinclair Award in 1985 through the Electroscience Laboratory

IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation,
Vol 39, No. 4, April 1991, pp. 473-479.

[2]

A Brief History of the ElectroScience Laboratory
by Leon Peters, Jr.

The Ohio State Univerity ElectroScience Laboratory

In Memorium: Jack H. Richmond (1922-1990)

He was born in Kalispell, Montana, on July 30, 1922. He received the BS degree, summa cum laude, from Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1950. He came to The Ohio State University as a graduate student in 1951, and obtained his PhD degree in 1955. He then joined the Department of Electrical Engineering as an assistant professor, and attained the rank of professor in 1962.

For four decades Professor Richmond engaged in research on the theory of antennas and scattering. In the early years, his efforts were concentrated on radome research, and developed new techniques to measure the near-zone field distributions on microwave antennas, and the perturbations introduced in the field by various radomes. In 1961, he generalized the reaction theorem to allow the fields of an antenna in one environment to be employed in calculating the mutual impedance in another environment. In the early sixties, Professor Richmond began to develop the moment-method solutions for various electromagnetic problems. These efforts led to the formulation of a sinusoidal-Galerkin solution for thin-wire structures, scatterers of arbitrary shape, noncircular cylinders, rectangular plates, and corner reflectors. A user-oriented computer program for thin-wire antennas and scatterers of arbitrary shape (the wire-grid model) in a homogeneous, conducting medium was developed in 1974. This program was widely distributed among the electromagnetic community, and has been applied to find the complex natural frequencies of various targets, to study the scattering properties of aircraft, to determine the properties of TEM-line antennas, and to numerous other problems. Since then, Professor Richmond’s research covered a wide spectrum of interesting problems. He has worked on dipoles over earth, Green’s functions for an infinitely-long, lossy wire and its application to wires with finite length, targets buried in the flat earth, surface waves on various structures, scattering from coated conducting surfaces, and many other problems. Most recently, Professor Richmond was investigating the variational aspect of the moment method, and the nonlinear effects in scattering.

In recognition of his contributions to the theory of antennas and scattering, Dr. Richmond was elected a Fellow of the IEEE, in 1980, and Life Fellow in 1988. In 1984, he was awarded the IEEE Centennial Medal, for his accomplishments over the past thirty years. He is one of eighteen individuals from the Antennas and Propagation Society who received this honor. Again, for his contributions in the area of moment methods, he was presented the George Sinclair Award, in 1985, by the ElectroScience Laboratory.

With the death of Jack, we lost a teacher and a friend. Jack was a man with humane decencies. He was kind, gentle, and down to earth. He was sensitive to people’s feelings, and his kindness extended to all the people around him. In public he was usually quite shy. But in close encounters, he engaged in lively conversations, and it was in those moments that his knowledge and humor shone. He was always ready to help, and shared his knowledge unselfishly with his students and fellow researchers. By doing, not by preaching, Jack set a high standard, not only for the technical work he did, but also for the moral values he believed in. These days we can no longer see Jack, with printout in hand, walking slowly in the hallway toward the computer room.

But we will always remember him with great respect and fond memories.

Nan Wang
The Ohio State University

IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 33, No.2, April 1991, p. 42.