He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship to begin his graduate studies in 1964 and received his Ph.D. in physics from The Johns Hopkins University in 1971 under the direction of H.Z. Cummins. Reese was a Visiting Fellow at University College, Oxford in 1990. He spent several summers working at the Naval Research Laboratory in both the Optical Sciences Division and the Biomolecular Engineering Branch investigating the interaction of visible and microwave electromagnetic radiation with various materials. The underlying philosophy of the text is to show how little needs to be known to understand as much as possible. Great emphasis is placed on strong conceptual development and understanding of fundamental physical principles.
Great care is taken to use the technical vocabulary as precisely as possible.
Many examples are solved in more than one way.