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= Peter D. Usher =

Peter D. Usher was born in South Africa on October 27, 1935, and is a naturalized citizen of the United States. He came to Harvard on a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship and received his PhD in astronomy in 1966. While a graduate student, he proposed rescuing the fully-steerable 600-foot (183-meter) radio telescope at Sugar Grove, West Virginia by converting it to an azimuth-steerable transit telescope. He discovered that equations developed using physical arguments and invariance principles, as occur in neutron transport problems for example, can be derived analytically, and his PhD thesis contained his independent discovery and unique derivation of a new method of coordinate stretching by which he generalized a method for the numerical solution of nonlinear two-point boundary value problems. He held a post-doctoral fellowship at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory under Professor C.A. Whitney, and while at American Science and Engineering he discovered the optical variability of the second optically identified X-ray star. In 1968, he joined the Astronomy Department at The Pennsylvania State University. From 1981 to 1990, he observed seven fields at high galactic latitude with the 48-inch (1.2 meter) Palomar Schmidt telescope and he and coworkers selected and catalogued about 4,000 faint blue objects in them. Dr. A.R. Sandage kindly supplied standard star magnitudes. This was the first quantitative application of a multicolor technique. Usher named the survey “US” after its chief selection effects –– strong Ultraviolet color and Starlike appearance. The technique provided relative instrumental colors and statistically complete samples that were the best in their class in 1984 and among the best in 2000.

In January 1997, Usher presented a paper to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Toronto, Canada, positing that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was an allegory for the four chief cosmological models that vied for acceptance at the turn of the seventeenth century. In 1999, the Elizabethan Review published this theory, whereupon Usher retired from Penn State with the rank of Emeritus Professor and devoted his time to researching the topic of Shakespeare and science. Shakespeare refers to Kepler’s Supernova of 1604, and establishes chronologies using astronomical events, but two unexpected results are that some of his plays are cosmic allegories, and that prior to the canonically accepted date of 1610 for the first use of an astronomical telescope, he reports data on the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars that he could not have known without telescopic aid. The instrument by which he gleaned this information is probably the astronomical telescope invented by Leonard Digges. Leonard’s death is reported to have occurred variously from 1553 to 1574, but there is no record of it. Books on these topics present and analyze evidence, and propose solutions. See also reports by Bill Condie and Dan Falk.