Ralph Alger Bagnold

Brigadier Ralph Alger Bagnold, FRS OBE, (3 April 1896 – 28 May 1990) was the founder and first commander of the British Army's Long Range Desert Group during World War II. He is also generally considered to have been a pioneer of desert exploration, an acclaim earned for his activities during the 1930s. These included the first recorded east-west crossing of the Libyan Desert (1932). Bagnold was also a veteran of World War I. He laid the foundations for the research on sand transport by wind in his influential book The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (first published 1941; reprinted by Dover in 2005), which is still a main reference in the field. It has, for instance, been used by NASA in studying sand dunes on Mars.