SYDNEY: John O’Sullivan received the 2009 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science for his part in creating of a luxury we are all familiar with: wireless internet access.

“To have made one of the major inventions, it certainly fills you with a lot of pride,” says O’Sullivan a systems engineer for the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility in New South Wales. “I already felt a lot of that pride when we came up with the answer to a difficult problem.”

He graduated from the University of Sydney with a dual degree in physics and electrical engineering, and continued with a PhD in radio astronomy. In 1977, O’Sullivan co-wrote a paper about Fourier Transforms, a set of mathematic equations, in order to sharpen optical telescope images distorted by the atmosphere.

He was helping the search for radio waves from exploding black holes, predicted in 1974 by Stephen Hawking, but the project wasn’t able to find them.

O’Sullivan was able to use the same technology for a completely different purpose though and created a fast and robust version of the wireless local area network (LAN). He became head of the Signal Processing Group in the CSIRO’s Division of Radiophysics, and in 1990, CSIRO decided to commercialise its aptitude in radio physics.

“We realised that our skills with antennas, signal processing, and radio design might allow us to remove the network cable that linked every office computer,” O’Sullivan says. “From the beginning we set out to match the speed of the best wired networks of the time.”

A problem arose: radio waves would reflect off various surfaces leading to a transmission followed by echoes. O’Sullivan used the mathematical equations to fix the problem. His team realised they could send the information over various frequencies and recombine them at the receiver, and within a year CSIRO applied for an Australian patent.

After a decade of working in the corporate world, O’Sullivan is now back in the fold of academia. He is working on the design of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder. This is a prototype telescope that is a step toward the full Square Kilometre Array, which will allow us to look back 13 billion years, almost to the origins of the universe.

“I sure have a burning desire to know what on Earth is going on out there,” he says.