John Hugh Westcott FRS, FREng, Hon FIEE (3 November 1920 – 10 October 2014) was a British scientist specialising in control systems and Professor of Computing and Automation at Imperial College London.

Career

Westcott was educated at Wandsworth Grammar School, the City and Guilds College, both in London, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His career began in radar research during World War II. After a year in Germany with the

Allied Commission Following the termination of hostilities in World War II, the Allies were in control of the defeated Axis countries. Anticipating the defeat of Germany and Japan, they had already set up the European Advisory Commission and a proposed Far Easter ...

, he obtained a scholarship to the MIT where many scientists returning from the services were addressing the early possibilities of computer applications. He was the first to lecture on the new field of

cybernetics Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson m ...

in Britain and was a member of the Ratio Club with

Grey Walter William Grey Walter (February 19, 1910 – May 6, 1977) was an United States, American-born United Kingdom, British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician. Early life and education Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, Kansas City, ...

, Alan Turing, Giles Brindley and others from various fields, who met between 1949 and 1952 to discuss brain mechanisms and related issues.The origins of British cybernetics: the Ratio Club
/ref> He researched servo-mechanisms at Imperial College London, where he headed the new Department of Computing and Control from 1966. A founder-member in 1957 of the International Federation of Automatic Control, one of the first professional bodies to liaise successfully across the

Iron Curtain The Iron Curtain was the political boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The term symbolizes the efforts by the Soviet Union (USSR) to block itself and its s ...

, he was a consultant to companies such as Shell, ICI, Westlands and British Steel Corporation in applying control systems to large and complex processes. In the 1970s and 1980s he also worked on macro-economic modelling and computer modelling for policy-evaluation.

Awards and honours

Westcott was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983 and a Fellow of the

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senior ...

(FREng) in 1980.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Westcott, John 1920 births 2014 deaths Academics of Imperial College London British computer scientists Fellows of the Royal Society British expatriates in the United States