Anthony E. Siegman

Anthony E. Siegman (November 23, 1931 – October 7, 2011) was an electrical engineer and educator at Stanford University who investigated and taught about masers and lasers.

He was appointed to the Stanford faculty on an acting basis in 1956 and became an assistant professor in 1957 after receiving the PhD in Electrical Engineering with a dissertation topic on microwave noise in electron beams.

Shortly thereafter he switched to work on microwave masers and parametric devices, which after 1960 evolved into a research and teaching career in lasers and optics.

He also spent sabbatical periods as visiting professor of applied physics at Harvard in 1965, as a Guggenheim Fellow at IBM Research - Zurich in 1969–70, and as an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, in 1984–85.

[2] Siegman's most notable contribution was in the area of unstable resonators; his book Lasers (1986) became a standard reference in the field.