Leopold Benno Felsen was born on May 7, 1924, in
Munich to Markus and Anna Felsen. He was of
Polish-Jewish descent, with his father being a
Polish citizen. His family was persecuted by the
Nazi regime due to their ancestry; in 1940, he was sent to the United States by his family to live with a relative. While his parents survived and joined him in the United States in 1946, many of his family members including his elder sister Johanna died during
the Holocaust. He received his bachelor, master, and PhD degrees from the
Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, in 1948, 1950, and 1952, respectively, all in
electrical engineering. and at Boston University College of Engineering, an
IEEE life fellow and a fellow of both the
Acoustical Society of America and the
Optical Society of America. and has been described as "The Bible" in applied electromagnetism.
Radiation and Scattering of Waves was reissued by
IEEE in 1994 and 2003 as one of classic reissues in the collection of
The IEEE Press Series on Electromagnetic Wave Theory. Following his retirement from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1994, Felsen relocated
Boston to be near his family and accepted a faculty position at
Boston University, teaching there until his death. From 1970s onward, he lived with
muscular dystrophy. He died on September 24, 2005, in
Boston, following complications from a surgery, and was survived by his two children and three grandchildren. == Awards ==