Thomas Kailath (Pune, India; 1935) obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1961 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1963, he was appointed associate professor in the subject at Stanford University, which has since become his academic home. He was promoted to professor in 1968, and named as the first holder of the Hitachi America Professorship in Engineering in 1988. He has also held shorter-term appointments at a series of institutions: the University of California, Berkeley, the Indian Statistical Institute, Bell Labs, the Indian Institute of Science, Cambridge University (United Kingdom), Imperial College (United Kingdom), and TU Munich (Germany). He became an American citizen in 1976.
Kailath is author of some 400 published papers and a number of textbooks that have become standard references in the field, among them Linear Systems (1980) and Linear Estimation (2000). His many distinctions include the U.S. National Medal of Science, awarded to him in 2014. He has also received the Medal of Honor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (2007) and the Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society. An elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he also has foreign membership of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering and the World Academy of Sciences.
Speech
Information and Communication Technologies, 2nd edition
Look behind technology and you’ll find mathematics. Each new device that reaches the market has first made the long trek from equations to industrial production: a multi-phase process that draws on ideas from many contributors at each different stage. Rarely does the same name appear at every point along the way. But Thomas Kailath is an exception. Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford University (United States), Kailath’s contributions may start from a theoretical advance, important in its own right, then progress through development stages to the launch of a new business venture.
From the drawing board to the home or, more precisely, the living room. For it is to Kailath we owe today’s powerful home computers and our wireless connections to the Internet. In the words of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge jury, Kailath has “developed engineering knowledge with transformative impact on the information and communication technologies that permeate everyday life.”
Kailath has “developed engineering knowledge with transformative impact on the information and communication technologies that permeate everyday life.”
TUITEAR
And his personal history is a no less remarkable journey. Kailath arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, United States), aged 22, after a long sea crossing from Bombay by way of Southampton and London. The money for this adventure had been loaned by his father’s boss, who had also given the young Kailath his first job, classifying seeds. A research grant made him the first ever Indian student at MIT and proof that the unlikeliest ambitions can become reality. “Studying abroad was never on my mind, because it seemed like an impossible dream,” Kailath relates. “I come from a family of quite limited means […]. My father was the only one in several generations of the family to go to college. My mother was married while she was still in high school […]. The only path to a good future for us, as for many others, was education. In 1951, when I finished school, it was just four years after India became independent. There was hardly any industry (even pencils were imported), and the best prospect for young people was to prepare for the Government selection exams.” So after graduating from Pune Engineering College, Kailath decided to compete for a post in public radio. But “fate” intervened, as he expresses it. The father of one of his friends, who had trained in the U.S., urged him to continue his studies at an American center and even took his application letter to MIT. Kailath, meantime, had also written to Harvard. The “impossible dream” became a bit less so. He was accepted by both centers, and opted for MIT.
And what about his area of study? Why Information and Communication Technology? Certainly not out of an unconditional love for mathematics. At primary school, Kailath would crouch down behind his classmates so the math teacher wouldn’t pick him out. He passed exams by memorizing the answers – the reason MIT would come as such “a revelation” with its teaching methods based on “thinking and understanding.” But geometry he found captivating, and began to study it in his free time. It was later, at university, that Kailath happened on his future specialty when reading an article by Claude Shannon titled “Information Theory” in the magazine Popular Science. That was back in 1950, when TV signal transmission was still an emerging technology.
His first years in the United States “laid the foundation for the rest of my career,” continues Kailath. His first publication, written while preparing his PhD thesis, had a greater impact than even he had suspected and brought him into contact with some of the leading researchers in the field. “Fortunately,” he remarks with hindsight, he turned down offers from a number of companies – that would have allowed him to pay back his travel loan – in order to get through his thesis. Finally, in 1963, he joined Stanford University as an Associate Professor, a bare 18 months after obtaining his doctorate. “These were interesting times,” Kailath recalls, coinciding with the nascent ICT revolution.
At the helm of Stanford was Fred Sterman, considered the father of Silicon Valley. So began a research career which has seen Kailath leave his mark on a different field in practically every decade. In the 1960s, he was mainly absorbed in communications; in the 1970s it was control theory; and in the 1980s it was signal detection by antenna arrays – the basis of mobile telephony. This was also the decade of his best known contribution: the miniaturization of the integrated circuits known as chips. And from there it was just a short leap, in the 1990s, to the problems of semiconductor manufacturing.
In the field of wireless communications, his work led to the development of a new antenna system now used, for example, in Wi-Fi technology, and was also instrumental in bringing to market the GSM cell phone standard. In chip miniaturization, methods of Kailath’s invention enabled the manufacture of integrated circuits with components finer even than the lightwaves used in their production, rather like drawing a line that is finer than the point of the pencil.
This discovery, moreover, emerged at a time when the limits of chip miniaturization seemed close and insurmountable. Kailath was able to conquer that barrier to achieve the results forecast by “Moore’s law,” whereby the number of transistors that can be placed in an integrated circuit doubles in each successive interval. “At that time it was thought that 100 nanometers was the smallest thing you could make in a chip with optics (a nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter). Right now, the limit stands at 32 nanometers. It was a really great feeling, an immense satisfaction, to be among the first to break through that barrier.”
Few of these advances, Kailath is plain, would ever have materialized without his students and collaborators. “In time I began to realize the value of using students as ‘intelligence amplifiers’ and of forming teams to enter new areas, often from scratch. Working with them has been an enormous pleasure. I have been lucky enough to attract magnificent students from all over the world. It is largely to them that I owe my success.” In the course of his career, Kailath has directed around 80 PhD theses, an uncommonly large number whose results are proudly displayed on his office shelves.
Many of his former disciples are now eminent researchers or corporate leaders at the helm of companies with thousands of workers. And Kailath too participated in a number of business ventures, in the boom years of Silicon Valley. Among the fruits of this success are the foundation he formed with his wife Sarah for the education of women and children in Southern India.
