Abstract :
James R. Wait was to the manor born in 1924. His father was the highest ranking officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II. Jim received all of his academic degrees from the University of Toronto, Canada, where he received the B.A.Sc. degree in 1948, the M.A.Sc. degree in 1949, and the Ph.D. degree in 1952, all in engineering physics. He spent three years in the Radio Physics Division, Defense Telecommunications Research Establishment (DTRE), before joining the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory, National Bureau of Standards, Boulder, CO, in 1955, where he remained until 1980, weathering several reorganizations. In 1980, he accepted a Professorship at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and was appointed Regents Professor in 1988, retiring in 1989. He died of a brain tumor in 1998. Jim Wait was one of our finest, as well as most prolific, electromagnetic theorists and published over 800 journal papers and eight books.
