General information

We honour outstanding people, partly to reward them for their excellence, but mostly because we need role models to hold up to the Next Generation. Unfortunately, there is a class of people that are so far off the curve that they are hard to emulate, and so they tend to be quietly forgotten. This is the case with Wim Brouw, and it is our intention to do something about it.

On July 6th/7th 2017, ASTRON will organize a symposium in Dwingeloo to celebrate the many contributions of Wim Brouw to the field of radio astronomy, especially with respect to the highly successful Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT).

Wim started his SRZM/NFRA/ASTRON career by saving the WSRT, i.e. by almost singlehandedly writing the observation, calibration and imaging software. This task had been a little underestimated in the plans because the WSRT was the first telescope in which computers played a central role. To do this, he had to advance the theory of Aperture Synthesis, especially for East-West arrays. Very importantly, he completed it all on time for the Royal Opening in 1970! His software was the basis for all the great WSRT discoveries of the 1970's.

He then played a significant role in producing the famous ultra-high dynamic-range WSRT images, by re-implementing the existing Redundancy (selfcal) package into its more user-friendly NEWSTAR guise. For good measure, he included extra functionality, like mosaicking for the WENSS survey. Finally, he wrote several modules for AIPS++ that are still widely used today, e.g. by CASA, BBS and MeqTrees. In his spare time, he squeezed unlikely performance out of the computers of the day, and he wrote a suite of financial administration software for ASTRON.

Apart from being a highly talented, and unbelievably productive scientific programmer, Wim was also a born "bestuurder". He served for almost 20 years as the effective Director in Dwingeloo. His job was
complicated by the organizational structure at the time, which included a rotating chairmanship of the "Werkgroep" in Dwingeloo. Wim’s defining characteristic as a Leader was that he hated to give direct orders, hoping that others would see the way forward as clearly as he did, and quietly doing things himself if they didn't.

Judging by the Alliant machine in the background, the above picture was taken around 1985, in the old Computer Room. Wim very much looks the part of the director/prodigy, much more so than he did in real life. After a decade in Australia, we are happy to have him back in Dwingeloo as a general-purpose sage.

The first day of the WimSym symposium will be concluded with a lovely barbecue in the shadow of the 25m telescope, where we can join Wim in watching the Sun go down over the Dwingeloo heath.

 

 


Contact: If you have any additional questions please send an email to Truus van den Brink-Havinga.