Name George Bekefi | Education McGill University (1952) | |
Died August 17, 1995, Brookline, Massachusetts, United States Books Electromagnetic Vibrations, Waves, and Radiation, Radiation Processes in Plasmas Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada | ||
George Bekefi (14 March 1925, Prague – 17 August 1995, Brookline, Massachusetts) was a plasma physicist, a professor at MIT, and an inventor.
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In 1939 Bekefi emigrated from Czechoslovakia to England by means of a British government program to help Jewish children. He received in 1948 a B.S. in science and mathematics from University College London. In 1948 he went to Montreal as an instructor in the physics department of McGill University, where he earned an M.S. in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1952. At McGill he became a research associate and then an assistant professor, leaving in 1957 to join MIT's Plasma Physics Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Bekefi remained at MIT for the remainder of his career. In MIT's physics department he became in 1961 an assistant professor, in 1964 an associate professor, and in 1967 a full professor, retiring in the summer of 1995 as professor emeritus.
(NOTE: The preceding quotation from the New York Times obituary should have "author or co-author" instead of "co-author" because Bekefi was the sole author of Radiation Processes in Plasmas.)
Bekefi guided about 50 graduate students to their M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. Upon his death from leukemia, he was survived by a wife, a son, and a daughter.