Bob Pease Killed in Car Crash

Posted on Wed 20 July 2011 in tech

Analog engineering legend Bob Pease killed in car crash

As a university student I took a job in an electronics lab while studying mechanical engineering. I guess the job required that you could solder and do a little metalworking, so I qualified on the latter and learned the former. In retrospect, it was the best possible thing I could have done at the time. It completely cured my fear of electronics, and it set the stage for a future filled with problems that didn't fit into a single engineering discipline.

All the guys I worked with in the lab read Bob Pease every time he was published. I started reading, too, even though I didn't always understand what his circuits did. I do recall, however, being able to grasp his articles on fuzzy logic as a student, mostly because I had studied enough control systems to make the discussion relevant. At the time, analog implementations for compensators were considered yesterday's news by academia. Bob showed us that they were as relevant as they ever were.