Georges A. Deschamps
Georges Armand Deschamps (October 18, 1911 – June 20, 1998) was a French-American engineer and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is known for his work in electromagnetic theory, microwave engineering, and antenna theory. He was an early pioneer of microstrip and patch antennas, which he proposed in 1953.
He was born in Vendôme, France, and grew up in Normandy. He studied mathematics at the École normale supérieure in Paris starting in 1931 and earned advanced degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Paris (Sorbonne). He spent a year as a research associate at Princeton in 1937, then taught mathematics and physics at the Lycée Français de New York. During World War II, he served as an engineer in the French Army on the Maginot Line. After escaping through North Africa, he returned to the United States in 1941 to resume teaching.
In 1947, Deschamps joined Federal Telecommunications Laboratories of ITT as a project engineer, working on radio navigation and antenna design. In 1958 he became director of the Antenna Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the research focused on frequency‑independent antennas.
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1978 for his contributions to electromagnetic scattering, microwave engineering, and laser beam propagation. He was a Life Fellow of IEEE and received the IEEE Centennial Medal (1984) and the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award (1987). He retired from UIUC in 1982.
Deschamps’ research covered electromagnetic theory and its applications to antennas and microwaves. In 1953 he introduced the patch antenna concept at a USAF symposium; patch antennas became widely used in the 1970s. At Illinois, his work included ray theory of electromagnetics, high-frequency approximations, and complex point source representations of Gaussian beams. After retirement, he also worked on applying differential forms to electromagnetics.
He died on June 20, 1998, and was survived by his wife Bunty, three children, and five grandchildren.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:29 (CET).