John Westcott
| John Westcott | |
|---|---|
| Born |
John Hugh Westcott 3 November 1920 |
| Died | 10 October 2014 (aged 93) |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Control Systems |
| Institutions | Imperial College London |
| Thesis | Studies in Analysis of Servomechanisms with the Development of a New Performance Criterion (1951) |
| Doctoral advisor | Colin Cherry[1] |
| Doctoral students |
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| Notable awards | Fellow of the Royal Society (1983)[2] |
John Hugh Westcott FRS,[2] FREng,[3] Hon FIEE (3 November 1920 – 10 October 2014)[2] was a British scientist specialising in control systems and Professor of Computing and Automation at Imperial College London.
Career
His career began in radar research during World War II. After a year in Germany with the Allied Commission, he obtained a scholarship to the MIT where many scientists returning from the services were addressing the early possibilities of computer applications.[4]
He was the first to lecture on the new field of cybernetics in Britain and was a member of the Ratio Club with Grey Walter, Alan Turing, Giles Brindley and others from various fields, who met between 1949 and 1952 to discuss brain mechanisms and related issues.[5] He researched servo-mechanisms at Imperial College London, where he headed the new Department of Computing and Control from 1966. A founder-member in 1957 of the International Federation of Automatic Control, one of the first professional bodies to liaise successfully across the Iron Curtain, he was a consultant to companies such as Shell, ICI, Westlands and British Steel in applying control systems to large and complex processes. In the 1970s and 1980s he also worked on macro-economic modelling and computer modelling for policy-evaluation.
Awards and honours
Westcott was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983[2] and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in (FREng) 1980.[3]
References
- 1 2 John Westcott at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- 1 2 3 4 Mayne, David Quinn (2015). "John Hugh Westcott 3 November 1920 — 10 October 2014". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (Royal Society publishing) 61. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2015.0017. ISSN 0080-4606.
- 1 2 "List of Fellows".
- ↑ John Westcott Obituary The Guardian
- ↑ The origins of British cybernetics: the Ratio Club
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