By the end of the 1950s, radio astronomy was generating a recognizable sub-discipline which was to prove influential in the later development of antennas and radio interferometry and also in information theory as applied to optics. Radar and radar astronomy, optics, electron microscopy, and, unexpectedly, image reconstruction in X-ray tomography were all to be influenced; in fact, a whole range of mathematical ideas connected with imaging in radio astronomy began in the 1950s to be pulled together and to crystallise as a whole.

This chapter will explain how these ideas developed as I saw them over years spent in Sydney, Cambridge and California and on visits to France. In addition, notes on individuals encountered along the way round out the human aspects that tend not to be chronicled in the terse journals.

Fortunately I had a good grounding in mathematics at Sydney University. T. G. Room had just taken over from H.S. Carslaw, whose book Fourier Series and Integrals was studied like the Bible. My other mathematics teachers were R.J. Lyons, W.B. Smyth-White, H.H. Thome and E.M. Wellish. In physics I was much influenced by V.A. Bailey, a mathematically powerful Oxford experimentalist.

I first encountered Joseph L. Pawsey (Lovell 1964) in a course of lectures on transmission lines and aerials that he gave at the Radiophysics Laboratory, Sydney, in 1942. The contrast with the orthodox text of Bewley (1933) offered food for serious thought and the lectures introduced me to the marvelous duality of physical vis-à-vis mathematical thinking. I have kept my lecture notes.