Martin Ryle

Martin Ryle (1918-84), British astronomer and Nobel laureate, known for his developmental work in radio astronomy. Ryle was born in Brighton, Sussex, and educated at the University of Oxford. After World War II he held a fellowship at Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. A lecturer, then professor of radio astronomy at Cambridge, he served from 1957 as director of the university's Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. Ryle made studies of celestial radio sources and directed the compilation of the Cambridge catalogs of radio sources, which provided the basis for the discovery of quasars. In 1966 he was knighted, and from 1972 to 1982 he was Britain's Astronomer Royal. In 1974 Ryle was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his development of aperture synthesis in radio astronomy. He shared the prize with the English physicist Antony Hewish.