People of Electronics

The mathematicians and engineers whose ideas this course is built on, from Bayes and Gauss to the people still shaping robots today. Tap any name to read their story.

• Georg Ohm 1789-1854 The German schoolteacher who measured his way to the single most useful equation in electronics: voltage equals current times resistance, the rule every multimeter reading and resistor calculation still rests on.
• Gustav Kirchhoff 1824-1887 The German physicist who wrote down the two bookkeeping rules for circuits (currents balance at every node, voltages sum to zero around every loop) that turn a tangle of components into solvable equations.
• Galileo Ferraris 1847-1897 The Italian physicist who discovered the rotating magnetic field independently of Tesla, demonstrating two-phase induction motors and proving the principle that underlies AC machines worldwide.
• Nikola Tesla 1856-1943 The Serbian-American inventor whose rotating magnetic field gave the world the AC induction motor, a brushless, self-starting machine whose descendants spin in everything from pumps to electric cars.
• Svante Arrhenius 1859-1927 The Swedish Nobel laureate whose equation links reaction rate to temperature, the math reliability engineers use to predict how heat ages electronics and to design accelerated life tests.
• Edith Clarke 1883-1959 The first woman employed as an electrical engineer in the US and the first female EE professor, whose Clarke transform reduces messy three-phase power math to a clean, computable form still used in motor control today.
• Waloddi Weibull 1887-1979 The Swedish engineer whose flexible probability distribution describes when things break and wear out, the statistical backbone of reliability testing, failure prediction, and the bathtub curve for electronics.
• Harry Nyquist 1889-1976 The Bell Labs engineer who proved you must sample a signal at least twice its highest frequency to capture it, the rule that governs every ADC, audio codec, and digital scope you will ever touch.
• Robert H. Park 1902-1994 The American engineer whose 1929 Park transform freezes a spinning motor's three-phase currents into a steady two-axis frame, the change of viewpoint that makes modern field-oriented motor control possible.
• Bob Widlar 1937-1991 The hard-drinking analog genius who invented the building blocks of linear ICs (the current source, the bandgap reference, the first integrated op-amps and voltage regulators) that sit inside nearly every chip you use.