Frederick Terman
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| Frederick Terman | |
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| Born | June 7, 1900 English, Indiana |
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| Died | December 19, 1982 (aged 82) |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Electrical engineering |
| Notable awards | IEEE Medal of Honor |
Frederick Emmons Terman (born June 7, 1900 in English, Indiana; died December 19, 1982) was an American academic. He is widely credited (together with William Shockley) with being the father of Silicon Valley.
Terman completed his undergraduate degree in chemistry and his master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University. His father Lewis Terman, the man who popularized the IQ test in America, was a professor at Stanford. Terman went on to earn an ScD in electrical engineering from MIT in 1924. His advisor at MIT was Vannevar Bush, who created the National Science Foundation.
From 1925 to 1941 Terman designed a course of study and research in electronics at Stanford that focused on work with vacuum tubes, circuits, and instrumentation. He also wrote Radio Engineering (first edition in 1932; second edition, much improved, in 1938), one of the most important books on electrical and radio engineering, and to this day a good reference on those subjects. Terman's students at Stanford included Oswald Garrison Villard, jr., William Hewlett, and David Packard. Just before World War II, Terman decided to dedicate some of the unused land on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto to an industrial park, called Stanford Industrial Park. He encouraged Hewlett and Packard to form a company (Hewlett-Packard) and house it on campus.
During World War II, Terman directed a staff of more than 850 at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University. This organization was the source of Allied jammers to block enemy radar, tunable receivers to detect radar signals, and aluminum strips (“chaff”) to produce spurious reflections on enemy radar receivers. These countermeasures significantly reduced the effectiveness of radar-directed anti-aircraft fire.
After the war Terman was appointed dean of engineering at Stanford University. He was awarded the IRE Medal of Honor in 1950 for "his many contributions to the radio and electronic industry as teacher, author, scientist and administrator", and served as provost at Stanford from 1955 to 1965. During his tenure, Terman greatly expanded the science, statistics and engineering departments in order to win more research grants from the Department of Defense. These grants, in addition to the funds that the patented research generated, helped to catapult Stanford into the ranks of the world's first class educational institutions, as well as spurring the growth of Silicon Valley. In 1964, Dr. Terman became a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. [1]
Terman's son teaches in Monterey at the Naval Post-Graduate School.
[edit] Commemoration
- The Frederick Emmons Terman Award was established in 1969 by the American Society for Engineering Education, Electrical and Computer Engineering Division. It is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and is bestowed annually upon an outstanding young electrical engineering educator.[2]
- The Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award is presented to the students that rank academically in the top five percent of the graduating senior class from the Stanford University School of Engineering. [3]
- Stanford's Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Center is named in his honor.
- Terman Middle School, in Palo Alto, California is named after Frederick Terman, a longtime resident.
[edit] External links
- PBS Biography
- Biography at SMECC.org
- List of Founding Members of National Academy of Engineering
- IEEE History Center biography
- The Secret History of Silicon Valley
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