Kenneth George Budden was born in 1915. He was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School and won a scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge. In 1936 he started work as a research student in the Cavendish Laboratory. On the outbreak of World War Two he joined the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), at Worth Matravers, near Swanage in Dorset. In 1941 he was sent to Washington DC as a member of the British Air Commission, and in 1945 joined the Air Command in South-East Asia as a civilian consultant. After the war he returned to Cambridge as a demonstrator in the Cavendish Laboratory and as a Fellow of St John’s College (from 1947). From 1965-82 he was a Reader in Physics at Cambridge University. In 1966 Budden was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of his experimental and theoretical work on the propagation of very long radio waves. He is best known for his publication, "Radio Waves in the Ionosphere" (1961). He died in 2005.