Peter Swerling (4 March 1929 – 25 August 2000) was one of the most influential radar theoreticians in the second half of the 20th century. He is best known for the class of statistically "fluctuating target" scattering models he developed at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s to characterize the performance of pulsed radar systems, referred to as Swerling Targets I, II, III, and IV in the literature of radar. Swerling also contributed to the optimal estimation of orbits of satellites and trajectories of missiles, anticipating the development of the Kalman filter. He also founded two companies, one of which continues his engineering work today. Biography Early life and family Peter Swerling was born in New York City on 4 March 1929 to Jo Swerling and Florence (née Manson) Swerling. He grew up in Beverly Hills, California, where his father was a successful screenwriter. Peter had a younger brother, Jo, Jr. Swerling’s father recognized his young son’s intellectual gifts. Granting a tenth birthday request, he introduced Peter to Albert Einstein, who advised the boy to continue his studies in mathematics. Education Peter Swerling entered the California Institute of Technology at the age of 15 and received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics three years later in 1947. He went on to take a second undergraduate degree, this time in Economics, from Cornell University in 1949, and was admitted into Phi Beta Kappa. He then attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received a Master of Arts in Mathematics in 1951 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1955. His thesis Families of Transformations in the Function Spaces Hp was advised by Angus Ellis Taylor, and investigated families of bounded linear transformations in Banach spaces. Career While still in graduate school, Swerling worked full-time for Douglas Aircraft Company as a staff member of the newly formed Project RAND. He wrote his landmark report, "Probability of Detection for Fluctuating Targets," for the RAND Corporation (now independent from Douglas Aircraft) in 1954. The paper introduced a set of statistically "fluctuating target" scattering models to characterize the detection performance of pulsed radar systems. Building on the work of Jess Marcum (who statistically subtracted noise from images of steady targets), Swerling accounted for statistical fluctuations of the target itself. The models became known as Swerling Target Models Cases I, II, III, and IV in radar literature. In related work, Swerling made significant