High-Frequency Techniques in

Diffraction Theory:
50 Years of Achievements in
GTD, PTD, and Related Approaches
Giuseppe Pelosi1,Yahya Rahmat-Samii2, and John L. Volakis3

Dept. of Information Engineering

1

University of Florence
Via di Santa Marta 3, I-50134 Florence, Italy
E-mail: giuseppe.pelosi@uni.it

2
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
University of California
Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA
E-mail: rahmat@ee.ucla.edu

3
ElectroScience Laboratory, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43212 USA
E-mail: volakis@ece.osu.edu

A s stated in the title, this special section of the IEEE Anten-

nas and Propagation Magazine was conceived to cele-
brate 50 years since the publications of two fundamental sci-
The next issue will contain other papers and, at the end, an
annotated bibliography, compiled by the editors.

entific works: the paper by
J. B. Keller, Geometrical Theory of Diffraction,
Journal of the Optical Society of America, 52, 1962,
pp. 116-130;
and the book by
P. Ya. Ufimtsev, Method of Edge Waves in the
Physical Theory of Diffraction, Moscow, Soviet
Radio, 1962 (in Russian).
The cover image of this issue of the IEEE Antennas and
Propagation Magazine, repeated in Figure 1, collects people
who made major contributions to electromagnetic scattering.
We have only included scientists and engineers who have
passed away. Clearly, this is a personal selection, necessarily
incomplete due to the limited size of the cover. Some of these
were awarded the Nobel prize, and they are indicated with the
golden Nobel medal and the relative year. Maxwell is shown
with a red border, since his 1864 paper was the turning point
at which a full, complete, mathematical theory of electromag-
netism was finally available.

The papers constituting the special section are numerous, due
to the relevance of the topic, and they hence needed to be split
between two issues of the Magazine. In this issue, we have
P. Ya. Ufimtsev, The 50-Year Anniversary of the
PTD: Comments on the PTDs Origin and Devel-
opment
It is worth remembering that this is not the only event
celebrating such a remembrance. Besides the present special
section, which required quite a long preparation, there was a
special session (organized by Rahmat-Samii and Volakis) at
the International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced
Applications (ICEAA), held in Cape Town, South Africa,
September 2011. Those papers are available on IEEEXplore.

Y. Rahmat-Samii, GTD, UTD, UAT, and STD: A
Historical Revisit and Personal Observations
G. Pelosi and S. Selleri, The Wedge-Type Problem:
The Building Brick in High-Frequency Scattering
from Complex Objects
We sincerely hope that this special section will serve
both seasoned researchers and newcomers dealing with the
fascinating topics in high-frequency electromagnetic diffrac-
tion.

16 ISSN 1045-9243/2012/$26 2013 IEEE IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 55, No. 3, June 2013

AP_Mag_Jun_2013_Final.indd 16 8/6/2013 1:24:04 PM

 Figure 1. The cover image of this issue, portraying scientists and engineers who contributed to electromagnetic scattering.

IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 55, No. 3, June 2013 17

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