Friday, October 10, 2014

My EE education, U.C. Berkeley BSEE, MSEE

I received my BSEE and MSEE at the University of California, Berkeley (BerkeleyMy first two years of engineering education were at Fullerton Junior College (FJC) in Fullerton, California, close to my hometown of Brea. I had wanted to become an Electrical Engineer since I was a 13 yrs old or so and had tinkered with electrical equipment, radios and motors etc, including resurrecting a B&W television set and converting it to a crude oscilloscope. The faculty at FJC was top-notch and I received a good grounding in calculus, differential equations, physics, chemistry, engineering and the usual humanities courses. After FJC, I wanted to continue my education in Electrical Engineering, rather than a general engineering program, and I was fortunate to transfer to Berkeley into their upper division electrical engineering department where my professors were outstanding and inspirational. I became an enthusiast of Maxwell's Equations (Maxwell's Equations) in my Electromagnetic Fields and Waves class taught by Professor John R. Whinnery (Professor Whinnery) and decided to continue studying E&M and antennas toward my MS degree. My timing was spot on, since Victor Rumsey (Professor Rumsey) had come to Berkeley in 1957. Professor Rumsey is well-known for his work on frequency-independent antennas and authoring a book on the topic (Frequency-Independent-Antennas) in addition to his work on reciprocity theory, his "Reaction Concept" (Reaction_Concept_in_Electromagnetic_Theory) that is such a powerful technique in the analysis of antennas, back-scattering, antenna radiation patterns, etc as in addition, it is a Variational analysis technique as Rumsey pointed out in a note to the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. Professor Harrington in his Time-Harmonic Electromagnetic Fields (Time-Harmonic Electromagnetic Fields) provides information on Rumsey's Reaction Concept and applications thereof. I often made use of the Reaction Concept in my work at the Naval Research Laboratory and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory over the next 50 years.

BTW, that's one of my wife Heide Wang's paintings in the background of my photo. She's a terrifically talented watercolor painter and terrific cook plus being a wonderful NiNi to her grandkids.

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