Lawrence L. Rauch *49

In 1941, Rauch received a bachelor’s in math and physics from the University of Southern California and enrolled in the Princeton Graduate School. From 1943 to 1949, he taught math at Princeton, sandwiched around full-time work for the War Research Board. He left for Michigan in 1949, the same year he received his math Ph.D. from Princeton. After Michigan, Rauch returned to California, and from 1977 to 1985 he was the chief technologist and senior research engineer at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Lab.  

Rauch’s long career involved supervising the development of radio telemetering for the first jet aircraft, and pressure telemetering for atomic bomb testing at the Bikini Atoll. He was involved in the design and testing of America’s first large space rockets. Rauch wrote the first book on radio telemetry and received major awards at international telemetering conferences in London in 1960 and in the U.S. in 1985.

Rauch is survived by his wife, Norma, two sons, and four grandchildren.