Sir Martin Ryle was a British astronomer who was one of the joint winners of Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974. Educated first at Bradfield College, he completed his graduation in physics from Christ Church College under University of Oxford. Later, he did his PhD under the guidance of John Ashworth Ratcliffe. However, before he could do that the World War II broke out and he joined Telecommunication Research Establishment to work on airborne radar system. Very soon he began to lead a group of scientists and those who worked with him remembered him for his extraordinary inventiveness and understanding. After the war, he received Fellowship from Imperial Chemical Industries and joined Ratcliffe at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Although he started his work on radio waves coming from the sun he soon shifted focus and concentrated on developing revolutionary radio telescope systems. Within a few years, he was first appointed to the post of Lecturer at the Cambridge University and then to the newly created Chair of Radio Astronomy. All along he led research teams from the front and devised increasingly efficient aperture synthesis. With them, he and his team could watch distant galaxies and discovered the first quasar and the first pulsar.
