Paul A. Gorton

Paul A. Gorton, beloved father, husband, brother, and friend, passed away on February 17 after a battle with cancer. He was 74.

Born 31 July 1951 to George and Marjorie Gorton, Paul grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire. As a young boy in Britain, he developed an interest in chemistry and could often be found at the local chemist’s shop buying reagents to combine in his experiments with his dad. He moved from chemistry to electricity and developed a skill for making radios as a teenager. This passion for the sciences guided him throughout his life. He undertook an undergraduate degree in cybernetics and completed a PhD in control engineering at the University of Manchester (UMIST) in 1982. Five years later, he moved to Canada and worked for many years as a radar engineer, becoming a leader at MacDonald Dettwiler (now MDA Space) in Richmond, British Columbia. Right up until he fell ill, Paul maintained an abiding interest in new developments in science and robotics. Paul embraced these projects with the same intellectual curiosity that had defined him as a child.

While Paul grew into a gifted scholar and scientist, his interests ranged widely. As a young man, he was a prodigious cricketer with an exceptional off-break bowl. In these same years, he founded a small pirate radio station, Radio Adelaide, and started a soul music disco club above three Victorian garages his mum and dad owned. Here, science met art, and even as the club became a relic of 1970s history, Paul cultivated a lifelong love of music and poetry alongside his deep engagement with the sciences. Paul loved Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Thomas Hardy. He read widely, from nineteenth-century poetry and science fiction to pure mathematics. These diverse threads, bound tightly together by his searching intelligence, reflect Paul’s enduring curiosity and hunger to learn, all qualities that he embodied in life.

Above all, Paul loved his family, and he will be remembered by them as a loving soul and a gentle man of exceptional kindness. Paul grew up happily in a close-knit family with his parents and brother, Mark, in Lancashire. There, in 1980, he met his future wife, Trish, whom he married in 1986. Together they had two children, George and Alice. In both Canada and England, Paul cultivated close friendships and was a loyal friend. Those closest to Paul knew him as an avid cyclist, a brilliant interlocutor, and a lover of nature. He had a special place in his heart for squirrels, dogs, rabbits, birds, and other animals, and he was always very funny. Paul is survived by his wife, Trish, his brother, Mark, his two children, George and Alice, and a wide extended family, all of whom already miss him beyond measure.