Dean Wooldridge

Dean Everett Wooldridge (30 May 1913 in Chickasha, Oklahoma – 20 September 2006 in Santa Barbara, California) was a prominent engineer in the aerospace industry. Something of a prodigy, Wooldridge graduated from high school at age of 14. He received his bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Oklahoma. Like his future colleague Simon Ramo, Wooldridge went on to study at the California Institute of Technology, from which he received his doctorate of physics (summa cum laude) in 1936. After leaving Caltech, Wooldridge moved first to Bell Laboratories, where he worked on the theory of magnetism. In 1946, he and Simon Ramo (his classmate at Caltech) both became director of research for the electronics department of Hughes...