Nationality American Role Engineer | Name Julius Stratton Doctoral advisor Paul Scherrer Fields Electrical engineering | |
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Born May 18, 1901
Seattle, Washington ( 1901-05-18 ) Notable awards IEEE Medal of Honor (1957)
Faraday Medal (1961) Died June 22, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts, United States Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Washington Awards IEEE Medal of Honor, Faraday Medal Books Electromagnetic theory, Mind and hand, The Effect of Rain and Fog on th, Spheroidal Wave Functions, Science and the Educated | ||
Residence United States of America | ||
Julius Adams Stratton (May 18, 1901 – June 22, 1994) was a U.S. electrical engineer and university administrator. He attended the University of Washington for one year, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's degree in electrical engineering (EE) in 1926. He then followed graduate studies in Europe and the Technische Hochschule of Zürich (ETH Zurich), Switzerland, awarded him the degree of Doctor of Science in 1927.
Professional biography
He published the classic book "Electromagnetic Theory" as part of the McGraw-Hill series in Pure and Applied Physics in 1941. It has been re-issued by the IEEE.
He served as the president of MIT between 1959 and 1966, after serving the university in several lesser posts, notably appointments to provost in 1949, vice president in 1951, and chancellor in 1956. He also served as the chairman of the Ford Foundation between 1964 and 1971. In 1967, Stratton was seconded to chair a Congressionally established "Commission on Marine Sciences, Engineering and Resources" whose work culminated in a report, "Our Nation and the Sea", published in 1969, that had a major influence on ocean sciences and management in the United States and abroad. The commission itself became commonly referred to as the Stratton Commission.
Stratton was also a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Stratton collected his speeches in a 1966 book titled Science and the Educated Man: Selected Speeches of Julius A. Stratton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), with a foreword by the historian of technology Elting E. Morison who had been on the faculty of MIT as a professor of humanities in the Sloan School of Industrial Management from 1946 to 1966.
MIT's Julius Adams Stratton Student Center at 84 Massachusetts Avenue is named in his honor.