Leopold B. Felsen, 81, Expert on the Properties of Waves -- Rest in Peace

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Subject: Leopold B. Felsen, 81, Expert on the Properties of Waves

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died Sept. 24

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Date Posted: October 11, 2005 11:16:45 EDT

Leopold B. Felsen, a leading expert on the waves of the electromagnetic spectrum who expanded his work to include waves in water and other mediums, died on Sept. 24 in Boston. He was 81.

The cause was complications of surgery, his son, Michael, said.

An author of more than 300 articles and several books, Dr. Felsen and Nathan Marcuvitz wrote "Radiation and Scattering of Waves," which experts called one of the seminal works in electromagnetics.

"We called it 'The Book' or 'The Bible,' " Prof. Renato Orta of the Polytechnic Institute of Turin, Italy, said in an e-mail message to the Felsen family. Dr. Felsen spent most of his career at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now Polytechnic University, where he was dean of engineering from 1974 to 1978 and a teaching professor until his retirement in 1994.

His association with the Brooklyn institution began after Army service in World War II, when he enrolled and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering there.

After retiring, Dr. Felsen moved to Boston to be near his family. Boston University, however, persuaded him to join its faculty, and he continued to teach there until his death.

Dr. Felsen, who lived with muscular dystrophy for 30 years, traveled the world to attend meetings and to lecture on wave physics. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and was named a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which said he "played a major role in bridging the gap between electromagnetics and other wave-based disciplines such as optics, structural and ocean acoustics, and geophysics."

As a pastime, Dr. Felsen wrote poems about science and other topics, and published many of them in a "Poet's Corner" he established in an electronics engineers journal. A poem, "Raves About Waves," began: "Those of us who are addicted to waves/Are constantly tricked by how a wave behaves."

Born in Munich, he was a Holocaust survivor who always resented having had to flee his native country, Michael Felsen said. Because of his Jewish ancestry, Leopold Felsen was sent to the United States when he was 16 to live with a relative. Many of his relatives, including an older sister, did not survive the war, but his parents did, arriving in 1946.

In addition to his son, who lives in Boston, Dr. Felsen is survived by a daughter, Judith, of Bartlett, N.H., and three grandchildren. His wife of 30 years, the former Sima Laks, died in 1975.

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