Willem "Bill" Brouwer Endowed Fellowship

Through this fellowship, the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science honors its first director, Willem "Bill" Brouwer. Dr. Brouwer joined RIT in 1983 as a visiting professor and became the founding director of the Carlson Center for Imaging Science. He came to RIT after a distinguished career as a designer of high-performance optical systems, having founded and served as president of Diffraction Limited, a private company in Bedford, Massachusetts, that designed ultra-high-performance optical systems for industry and government customers. Among the systems he designed were the navigational sextant for the U-2 ultra-high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and the long-range optical system for the SR-71 long-range reconnaissance aircraft. Bill was also the inventor of the now-ubiquitous matrix method in geometrical optics. The subject of his doctoral dissertation, he first taught this method in courses at Boston University in the 1960s, where he met Edward O'Neill, a pioneer in the field of Fourier optics. Bill and Ed deepened their knowledge by 'swapping' courses at BU, recognizing that the best way to master a subject was to teach it. Bill eventually shared the methods he developed as a graduate student in his monograph Matrix Methods in Optical Instrument Design, published in 1964 as part of the Lecture Notes and Supplements in Physics series.

A gifted teacher and mentor, Bill profoundly impacted many former students, introducing them to the worlds of imaging, optics, and research. In his memoir, My Odyssey, The Life of a Dutch Boy Born in Indonesia, he wrote: 'I tell my students that to learn anything, they should first sit down with a glass of Chablis and think of how they would attack the problem. This lesson has served me very well in life.'"