I was a part of Tom Kailaths group when visiting Stanford in 2004-2007. Here is a letter that I received from him today. It is addressed to more than 100 of his former Ph.D. students and post-doctoral visitors. -------------------------------- Dear doctoral and postdoctoral colleagues: Some of you have already seen the news about my being named as a recipient of the National Medal of Science. It is a very high honor, especially for engineers. A quick check (probably incomplete) shows that from Stanford engineering, Prof. Quate in EE, Prof. Knuth in CS/Math, and Prof. Acrivos in ChemE, were previous recipients. The announcement was issued by the White House while we were traveling back to Stanford from Washington DC, where I had the honor of presenting the 2014 Marconi award to Prof. Paulraj. And immediately on our return we were occupied with activities related to the third Sarah Kailath Memorial Lecture (on Women and Leadership) at UC Berkeley, which took place yesterday. Today I can sit and write to all of you, to share some of my sentiments about this very gratifying award. When Stanford requested a response from me last Friday, the first sentences I wrote back to them were: “This is indeed a great honor for me, which I proudly share with my students and coauthors. I am also grateful for the remarkably supportive environment of the EE department and the University.” As I look back on my career I see that during the first decade, most of my papers were single-authored, while several students published under their own names. But my work on detection theory required recursive least squares estimates, as did my work with Piet Schalkwijk on feedback communications. This required me to study Kalman filtering and optimal control, and I realized that it was more efficient for me to have my students teach me that material, because I could learn from them at my own pace, and in the way that I learn best: asking questions. Working with students enabled me to use them as “intelligence amplifiers”. If discussions led to interesting issues, the students would often come back the next morning or a couple of days later with solutions and good ideas, which then led to further questions, and so on. I abandoned the 700+ pages of notes towards an intended book on detection theory, painstakingly typed by my loyal long-time assistant, Barbara McKee, and instead began to learn linear systems. As I stated in the preface of my Linear Systems text, five PhD dissertations help clarify the material in the book. And our work on Kalman filtering, Chandrasekhar algorithms, and displacement structure progressed in the same fashion. I also began to realize that when we enter new fields, it was useful to have a group of students and postdocs work together in the early stages. That way, the students not only completed their own dissertations but also had several joint papers. This was the story of how we got into VLSI architectures for signal processing, scattering theory, high resolution algorithms for direction finding, displacement structure, interpolation theory, semiconductor manufacturing, ... . It has been a fantastic ride, and I will always be grateful to all of you for our shared “Aha” moments and our joy in finding new results, understanding things in the most natural way, often defining frontiers of research, and in some cases forming entures to productize the ideas. You’ve been the most distinguished and accomplished group that a professor could hope to count as his students, postdocs, colleagues. Prof. Cioffi was quoted in a Stanford story, when I got the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2007, that there was probably no other EE student group in history like ours! There is some other important and very happy news that I want to share with those of you who do not already know. On Thanksgiving day last year, I married a long-time friend (with a Stanford PhD in economics), Dr Anuradha Luther Maitra, on the portico of our new home in Atherton, with family, friends and colleagues present. Before and since then, Anu and I have kept up a packed schedule of international travel, for both work and relaxation. There are plans afoot to have a reunion of all of us sometime next year, on the occasion of another decade birthday. I will look forward to seeing many of you at that time. With many thanks again for all that our collaborations and friendship have led to, and with warmest regards, Tom/TK/Prof. Kailath (you are all free, as ever, to choose your favorite designation!)
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 04:28:05 +0000
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