Dean Wooldridge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dean Everett Wooldridge (born 30 May 1913 in Chickasha, OK–died 20 Sep 2006 in Santa Barbara, CA) was a prominent engineer in the aerospace industry.
Something of a prodigy, Wooldridge graduated from high school at age of 14. He received his bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Oklahoma. Like his future colleague Simon Ramo, Wooldridge went on to study at the California Institute of Technology, from which he received his doctorate of physics (summa cum laude) in 1936.
After leaving Caltech, Wooldridge moved first to Bell Laboratories, where he worked on the theory of magnetism. In 1946, he and Simon Ramo (his classmate at Caltech) formed the electronics company now known as Hughes Electronics. In 1953, the two left to found Ramo-Wooldridge, a highly successful corporation working largely on contracts for the US Air Force, including the Pioneer 1 spacecraft. That year, both Ramo and Wooldridge also served on the Strategic Missile Evaluation Committee (SMEC) headed by John von Neumann.
In 1958, Ramo-Wooldridge merged with Thompson Products to form TRW, which carried on the success of its predecessor. (In 2002, TRW was bought by Northrop Grumman.) Wooldridge served as president of TRW until he retired in 1962.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He died of pneumonia on September 20, 2006 at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, California.
[edit] Books
- The Machinery of the Brain, Dean Wooldridge, McGraw-Hill (1971), ASIN: B000GRLHYA
- The Machinery of Life, Dean Wooldridge
- Mechanical Man: The Physical Basis of Intelligent Life, Dean Wooldridge, McGraw-Hill (1969), ASIN: B000BTNUHA
- Sensory Processing in the Brain, Dean Wooldridge, John Wiley & Sons Inc (August 1979), ISBN 0471052698
