Professor W.J. Fitzgerald obituary

William (Bill) J. Fitzgerald, Professor of Applied Statistics and Signal Processing in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University played a central role in establishing Bayesian statistical theory as the bedrock of modern signal processing theory and practice. He achieved this not only through his personal seminal scientific contributions but by inspiring a long line of Ph.D. students who have gone on to develop the concepts further in academic, industrial and financial organisations throughout the world. Bill Fitzgerald read physics at the University of Birmingham, followed by an M.Sc. in the Physics of Solids and ultimately for a Ph.D. in the same area. Following his Ph.D. work he was appointed to a one year research fellowship at Birmingham which enabled him to continue with his research and also take on some undergraduate teaching. For the next 10 years he worked at various research institutes and universities in France, Switzerland and Ireland. It was while working at the Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble that he met Marianne Klein, then a Ph.D. student, who was to become his wife. On his return to England in 1983 he accepted a post at Schlumberger Cambridge Research laboratory. He brought his relentless enthusiasm to bear on understanding the roles of mineralogy,