Edward Hutchinson Synge

Edward Hutchinson Synge (1 June 1890 – 26 May 1957) was an Irish physicist who published a complete theoretical description of the near-field scanning optical microscope, an instrument used in nanotechnology, several decades before it was experimentally developed. He never completed university yet did significant original research in both microscopy and telescopy. He was the first to apply the principle of scanning in imaging, which later became important in in a wide range of technologies including television, radar, and scanning electron microscopy. He was the older brother of distinguished mathematician and theoretical physicist John Lighton Synge.

E. H. Synge was the son of Edward Synge and Ellen Frances Price. He was familiarly known as "Hutchie". He was the nephew of playwright John Millington Synge and the brother of John Lighton Synge who edited the collected works of Sir William Rowan Hamilton at Hutchie's urging. He and brother John were great-great-great-grand-sons of Irish bishop Hugh Hamilton. He is also the uncle of the mathematician Cathleen Synge Morawetz. Throughout his life Synge was very physically active, pursuing walking, cycling, swimming and sailing. In his later life he took up painting and was good at it.

In 1908 he entered Trinity College Dublin to study Mathematics and old Irish. For three years he was a brilliant student and won several prizes and a Foundation Scholarship in mathematics in 1910. Then at the end of his third year he came into an inheritance from his uncle John Millington Synge and dropped out of university. For a decade and a half he lived a reclusive life and continued his studies in isolation.

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