Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 182
OCR for page 183
ALLEN M
.
1922-1994
PETERSON
BY VON R. ESHLEMAN
ALLEN MONTGOMERY PETERSON, emeritus professor of electri-
cal engineering, died of a heart attack at his home in Los
Altos, California, on August 17, 1994. He was seventy-two.
He was born in Santa Clara on May 22, 1922. He served in
the Army Air Force during World War Il en c! was in the Battle
of the Bulge. At Stanford University he received B.S. (194~3),
M.S. (1949) and Ph.D. (1952) degrees in electrical engineer-
ing. He rose to the rank of professor in 1961 and became
emeritus in 1992.
Peterson's association with Stanford University as student,
researcher, and professor spanned half a century. Starting in
1954, Peterson held clual positions at the university ant! at the
Stanforc! Research Institute (SRI), MenIo Park, through a spe-
cial arrangement made by the late Frederick Terman, often
called the father of Silicon Valley. At SRI, Peterson was a se-
nior scientific adviser en c! was the key person in initiating en cl
building up what became the Radio Physics Laboratory and
the Communications Laboratory, where about three hundred
people have been involves! in communications and defense
problems.
At Stanford, Peterson developed and taught courses on ra-
dar systems, cligital signal processing, microprocessors, logic
design, and cligital filters. He worked with a large number of
graduate student assistants en c! was the mentor for approxi
183
OCR for page 184
184
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
mately one hundred students who received advanced degrees.
Although officially retired, Peterson was the adviser for seven
graduate students at the time of his death.
With students and colleagues, Peterson initiated several sig-
nificant areas of research, including racier oceanography and
radar-acoustic sounding of the atmosphere. His dissertation
studies and later research were instrumental in the develop-
ment of the over-the-horizon radar systems that were installed
in the United States and the Soviet Union for early warning of
ballistic missile attack. His work in the 1950s on radar reflec
tions from the trails procluced by meteors helped initiate
continuing applications to communications and basic studies
of the upper atmosphere. He was active in ionospheric and
auroral studies during the International Geophysical Year. The
innovative method Peterson invented for sounding the atmo-
sphere with a combination of acoustic and radar waves led to
commercial systems and stimulated international conferences
on this method of environmental and weather measurement.
He also helped start the discipline of radar astronomy, which
has providecl new methods to study surfaces and atmospheres
of the other planets of our solar system.
Commercial applications of digital systems developer! by
Peterson and his students include a widely applied filter bank
for transferring between time and frequency division multi-
plex signals in telecommunications systems; worIclwide sales
of this and similar crevices were on the order of a billion dol-
lars during the mid-l9SOs. Related studies at Stanford lecT to
an early concept for a million-channel receiver for the nation-
al program called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
At the time of his death, Peterson was working with a former
student on a technique for vastly reducing the power con-
gumption of electronic chips.
For decacles up to the time of his death, Peterson was in-
volved with several Silicon Valley start-up companies, the
Department of Defense, and other governmental agencies.
Since 1961 he had been a member of the JASON group of
about fifty academics who meet yearly to advise the secretary
of defense on scientific matters relatecl to national defense.
OCR for page 185
ALLEN M. PETERSON
185
He was a member of the White House Science Council on
Space Defense related to the Strategic Defense Initiative, the
Naval Strategies Board, the Air Force Studies Board, the Voice
of America Broadcast Engineering Advisory Committee, the
let Propulsion Laboratory Advisory Council, and several Na-
tional Research Council committees.
Peterson server! as a consultant to a number of companies
en cl to the President's Science Advisory Committee, the De-
fense Atomic Support Agency, the A(lvancec3 Research Projects
Agency, the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Office of Tele-
communications, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
He served for a time as the chief scientist of the Science Appli-
cations International Corporation. He had a long-term
association with the Geophysical Institute of the University of
Alaska and caused a "northern exposure" fracas when his ra-
clar studies of the aurora lee! to an account in a local
newspaper that he planned to turn off the northern lights.
Allen Peterson touched the lives of numerous students, col-
leagues, and friends throughout the worIcl. He will be sorely
missed by all.
He is survived by his wife of fifty-one years, Shirley, a full
partner in the esteem of colleagues and students who were
welcomed to their home, and by four children, three grand-
chilciren, and two brothers.
The Allen Peterson Memorial Fund has been establishecl in
the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford ant! will be
used to assist graduate students.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
electrical engineering
