Brendan Scaife

Brendan Kevin Patrick Scaife FTCD, MRIA, Boyle Laureate^[1] (/skeɪf/; born 19 May 1928), is an Irish academic engineer and physicist who carried out pioneering work on the theory of dielectrics. Scaife founded the Dielectrics Group in Trinity College Dublin where he is Fellow Emeritus and formerly Professor of Electromagnetism, and previously to that a professor of engineering science.

Scaife showed that in a linear system the decay function is directly proportional to the autocorrelation function of the corresponding fluctuating macroscopic variable, and proved how the spectral density of the dipole moment fluctuations of a dielectric body could be calculated from the frequency dependence of the complex permittivity, ${\displaystyle \epsilon (\omega )=\epsilon '(\omega )-i\epsilon ''(\omega )}$. It was independent of Ryogo Kubo who in 1957 developed the corresponding theory for magnetic materials. The work was published prior to the work of Robert Cole in 1965 which is often cited.