Schelkunoff was born in
Samara, Russia in 1897, attended the
University of Moscow before being drafted in 1917. He crossed
Siberia into
Manchuria and then
Japan before settling in
Seattle in 1921. There he received bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the State College of Washington, now
Washington State University, and in 1928 received his Ph.D. from
Columbia University for his dissertation
On Certain Properties of the Metrical and Generalized Metrical Groups in Linear Spaces of Dimension. After receiving his degree, Schelkunoff joined
Western Electric's research wing, which became
Bell Laboratories. In 1933 he and
Sally P. Mead began analysis of
waveguide propagation discovered analytically by their colleague
George C. Southworth. Their analysis uncovered the
transverse modes. Schelkunoff appears to have been the first to notice the important practical consequences of the fact that attenuation in the
TE01 mode decays inversely with the power of the frequency. In 1935 he and his colleagues reported that
coaxial cable, then new, could transmit
television pictures or up to 200
telephone conversations. During his 35 year career at Bell Labs, Schelkunoff's research included
radar,
electromagnetic wave propagation in the atmosphere and in microwave guides,
short-wave radio, broad-band
antennas, and grounding. He taught for five years at
Columbia University, and later served as assistant director of mathematical research and assistant vice president for university relations. He retired from Columbia U. in 1965, and served as a consultant on
magnetrons for the United States Naval Station at
San Diego. Schelkunoff received 15 patents, the
IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award from the
Institute of Radio Engineers (1942), and the
Franklin Institute's
Stuart Ballantine Medal (1949). He died on 2 May 1992, in
Hightstown, New Jersey. == Selected works ==