M. E. Van Valkenburg

MAC ELWYN VAN VALKENBURG, former W.W. Grainger Professor Emeritus of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dean Emeritus of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, died on March 19, 1997, at the age of 75. He was elected to NAE in 1973. Mac was born on October 5, 1921, in Union, Utah, the son of Charles M. and Nora Louise Walker Van Valkenburg. In grade school, Mac was inspired by a neighbor boy who had figured out how to use a one-tube, battery-powered radio to amplify sound from a hand-cranked phonograph. Before he was a teenager, Mac and a close friend, Vance Burgon, were making crystal radio receivers from copper coils wrapped around oatmeal boxes and crystals of galena found in nearby copper deposits. The two became amateur radio operators, and their walls were plastered with QSL (one of the Q codes used in radiocommunication and radio broadcasting) cards, postcards from other ham radio operators verifying that their signal had been received. Soon the boys were scripting a radio program based on information from ham radio magazines and their own experiences. The program aired late Saturday night on radio station KSL in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Jordan High School in Sandy, Utah, Mac enrolled in the electrical engineering program at the University of Utah, where he earned his B.S. in 1943. On August 27 of that year, he married his high school sweetheart, Evelyn June Pate, in Salt Lake City. Since the United States was in the midst of World War II and Mac was a top student, upon graduation he received an assignment to join the staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Radiation Laboratory, where he helped develop radar under the direction of the renowned Ernst Guillemin. In 1946, Mac received his M.S. from MIT and returned to the University of Utah where he taught until 1955, with a leave of absence from 1949 to 1952 to pursue his Ph.D. at Stanford University. Interestingly, his Ph.D. thesis was on the detection of meteor trails in the ionosphere. While at Stanford, Mac was asked to develop a new course on servomechanisms. One can only conjecture that this daunting assignment might have stimulated his interest in circuits and systems. Mac joined the faculty of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) in 1955, where he was associate director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory and, for a semester, acting department head. In 1966, he became head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, and in 1974, he returned to Illinois where, in 1982, he was named to the College of Engineering’s fi rst endowed chair, the W.W. Grainger Professorship. In 1984, he was appointed dean of the College of Engineering. Upon his retirement in 1988, Illinois Chancellor Thomas Everhart said, “The renaissance in engineering, which has seen an explosion of new endeavors in the past three years, has been due, in no small part, to the supportive atmosphere Dean Van Valkenburg has embodied and the encouragement he has given to new initiatives. ” Although Ernst Guillemin is rightfully called the father of modern circuit and system theory in engineering education, Mac’s books made those concepts understandable to the masses worldwide. In an era of dc/ac analysis, the revolutionary time domain/frequency domain transform methodologies were little understood by most engineering educators. The first edition of Network Analysis (Prentice Hall) was published in 1955, but Mac’s fame as an engineering educator was cemented in 1960 with the publication of his second book, Introduction to Modern Network Synthesis (Wiley, 1960). The second and third editions of Network Analysis were published in 1964 and 1974 respectively, and his final book, Analog Filter Design (Holt Rinehart & Winston) was published in 1982. All of his books were translated into several languages and became standard texts worldwide