Academic Genealogy

  • Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)
    Edison employed Arthur Kennelly at his West Orange laboratory from 1887 to 1894 (thus, Kennelly received his advanced education the old-fashioned way).
  • Arthur Edwin Kennelly (1861-1939)
    Kennelly supervised Vannevar Bush, Oscillating-current circuits; An extension of the theory of generalized angular velocities, with applications to the coupled circuit and the artificial transmission line, Eng.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1916.
  • Vannevar Bush (1890-1974)
    Bush supervised Harold Locke Hazen, The extension of electrical engineering analysis through the reduction of computational limitations by mechanical methods, Sc.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1931.

    Bush and Hazen also built MIT's first computer, as documented in their paper "The differential analyzer: A new machine for solving differential equations," Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol. 212, no. 4, pp. 447–488, Oct. 1931.

  • Harold L. Hazen (1901-1980)
    Harold Hazen coined the term "servo-mechanism" in his paper "Theory of servo-mechanisms," Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol. 218, no. 3, pp. 279–331, Sept. 1934.

    Hazen supervised Gordon Stanley Brown, The cinema integraph, a machine for evaluating a parametric product integral, Sc.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1938.

  • Gordon S. Brown (1907-1996)
    Gordon Brown was the founder of the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory, and its head from 1939 to 1952. See footnote.

    Brown supervised Donald Pierce Campbell, Power studies in linear feedback systems, Sc.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1949.

    Brown and Campbell also co-authored the classic control-systems textbook Principles of Servomechanisms (Wiley, New York, 1948).

  • Donald P. Campbell (1917?-1957)
    Campbell supervised Leonard Abraham Gould, The dynamic behavior and control of heat transfer processes, Sc.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1953.
  • Leonard A. Gould (b. 1927)
    Gould supervised James K. Roberge, The Mechanical Seal, Bachelor's thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960.

    (I admit that this connection is not-the-norm, but I use it for two reasons: First, it is a landmark publication, being the first reported inverted-pendulum system, and it is still referenced today. Second, Roberge's Sc.D. dissertation (Gated amplifiers for data processing in space, MIT, 1966) was supervised by Frank Reintjes, who does not hold a doctorate. See footnote.)

  • James K. Roberge (b. 1937)
    Roberge supervised Kent H. Lundberg, A high-speed, low-power analog-to-digital converter in fully depleted silicon-on-insulator technology, Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002.

    Lundberg and Roberge also co-authored "Classical Dual-Inverted-Pendulum Control." In Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, December 9-12, 2003, Maui, Hawaii, pp. 4399--4404, which was a direct extension of The Mechanical Seal.

  • Kent H. Lundberg

Footnotes

  • Heads of the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory
    1. Gordon S. Brown 1939-1952
    2. William M. Pease 1952-1953
    3. J. Francis Reintjes 1953-1974
    4. Michael Athans 1974-1981

    Renamed the Electronic Systems Laboratory (ESL) in 1959
    Renamed the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) in 1978.

  • J. Francis Reintjes
    Frank Reintjes is coauthor (with G.T. Coate) of the text Principles of Radar (McGraw-Hill 1953) and was an instructor at the MIT Radar School. When the Radar School was closed after WWII, Reintjes became a professor at MIT, even though he did not hold a doctorate. He was Head of the MIT Servo Lab from 1953 to 1974.


Kent H Lundberg (email address)
Last updated April 9, 2007.