Engineer, Applied Mathematician, Entrepreneur, and Teacher extraordinaire. Professor Thomas Kailath, doyen of Communication Engineering and Information Theory, is currently the Hitachi America Professor Emeritus of Engineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Professor Kailath completed his undergraduate studies at the College of Engineering in Pune, India, and then took his doctoral degree at the…
Inventor of the microprocessor. In 1971, Intel Corporation introduced the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, a technological feat that (understatement alert) changed the world. What the fractional horsepower motor did to the Industrial Revolution, the microprocessor did to the ongoing digital revolution. The original architecture of the microprocessor was conceived by Marcian “Ted” Hoff,…
A pioneer in Fibre Optics. In the early 1950s, a young Indian from Punjab, Narinder Singh Kapany, then a graduate student in the Physics Department at Imperial College in London, developed a bundle of fibres suitable for low-loss optical transmission. This key advance lead to a flowering of an entire new field of technology known…
The sage of Silicon Valley. The legendary computer scientist and professor at Stanford University, Donald Knuth, has spent his entire intellectual life searching for patterns in theoretical computer science, making fundamental contributions in a wide range of topics, and then clarifying them in his magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming, work on which began…
The results of the state elections in Goa are just in: Manohar Parrikar and his team have emerged victorious and are set to return after 7 years of political exile. He is expected to be sworn in as Chief Minister shortly. On a visit to California in January 2010, I took Manohar-bab to Google’s…
