Ronald Martin Foster was a Bell Labs

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

 mathematician whose work was of significance regarding electronic filter

Electronic filter

Electronic filters are electronic circuits which perform signal processing functions, specifically to remove unwanted frequency components from the signal, to enhance wanted ones, or both...

s for use on telephone lines. He published an important paper, A Reactance Theorem, (see Foster's reactance theorem) which quickly inspired Wilhelm Cauer

Wilhelm Cauer

Wilhelm Cauer was a German mathematician and scientist. He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis...

 to begin his program of network synthesis filters

Network synthesis filters

Network synthesis is a method of designing signal processing filters. It has produced several important classes of filter including the Butterworth filter, the Chebyshev filter and the Elliptic filter. It was originally intended to be applied to the design of passive linear analogue filters but...

 which put the design of filters on a firm mathematical footing. He is also known for the Foster census of cubic

Cubic graph

In the mathematical field of graph theory, a cubic graph is a graph in which all vertices have degree three. In other words a cubic graph is a 3-regular graph. Cubic graphs are also called trivalent graphs....

 symmetric graph

Symmetric graph

In the mathematical field of graph theory, a graph G is symmetric if, given any two pairs of adjacent vertices u1—v1 and u2—v2 of G, there is an automorphismsuch that...

s and the 90-vertex cubic symmetric Foster graph

Foster graph

In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Foster graph is a 3-regular graph with 90 vertices and 135 edges.The Foster graph is Hamiltonian and has chromatic number 2, chromatic index 3, radius 8, diameter 8 and girth 10. It is also a 3-vertex-connected and 3-edge-connected graph.All the cubic...

.

Education

Foster was a Harvard College

Harvard College

Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...

 graduate S.B. (Mathematics), summa cum laude, Class of 1917. He also received two honorary Sc.D.s.

Professional career

• 1917 – 1943 Research & Development Department (later Bell Labs
  Bell Labs
  Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
  
  ), American Telephone & Telegraph
  American Telephone & Telegraph
  AT&T Corp., originally American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American telecommunications company that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agencies. AT&T is the oldest telecommunications company...
  
  , as a Research Engineer (Applied Mathematician), New York City, New York.
• 1943 – 1963 Professor and Head of Department of Mathematics, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York City, New York.

Publications

• Campbell, GA, Foster, RM, Fourier Integrals for Practical Applications, "Bell Systems Technical Journal", pp639-707, 1928.
• Pierce, BO, Foster. RM. "A Short Table of Integrals", Fourth Edition, Ginn and Company, pp1-189, 1956.