Professor Peter Felgett FRS – First UK Professor of Cybernetics

Article Type: News conferences and technical reports From: Kybernetes, Volume 38, Issue 3/4

It was with great regret that this journal has been informed of the death of Professor Peter Fellgett (November 2008).

Dr Alex Andrew a former colleague of Dr Fellgett at the University of Reading, UK, writes:

He was the first Professor of Cybernetics in Britain, appointed in Reading in 1964 (a few years before the Appointment of Frank George in Brunel). He had previously been on the staff of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh and had been a visiting worker in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in USA. In his earlier work he was responsible for a revolutionary improvement in means of recording infrared spectra of stars, termed the “Fellgett advantage.” In Reading he headed a department in which undergraduate courses in cybernetics were set up, as well as research projects, in the face of some opposition from scientists in more established areas. Among other things he was responsible for a major development in sound recording and reproduction, in which use of four channels allowed “surround sound” with unprecedented realism.

A full obituary will appear in later issues of Kybernetes.