David Sayre, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

David Sayre

American X-ray crystallographer

Date of Birth: 02-Mar-1924

Place of Birth: New York City, New York, United States

Date of Death: 23-Feb-2012

Profession: computer scientist, physicist, mathematician, university teacher, crystallographer

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Pisces

David Sayre (March 2, 1924 – February 23, 2012) was an American scientist, credited with the early development of direct methods for protein crystallography and of diffraction microscopy (also called coherent diffraction imaging).
While working at IBM he was part of the initial team of ten programmers who created FORTRAN, and later suggested the use of electron beam lithography for the fabrication of X-ray Fresnel zone plates. The International Union of Crystallography awarded Sayre the Ewald Prize in 2008 for the "unique breadth of his contributions to crystallography, which range from seminal contributions to the solving of the phase problem to the complex physics of imaging generic objects by X-ray diffraction and microscopy(...)".