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Gordon Stanley Brown (1907 in Australia
Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the Australia of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania, and numerous list of islands of Australia in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans....
 – 23 August 1996 in Tucson, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona

Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, Arizona, United States, located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix, Arizona and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border....
) was a professor of electrical engineering
Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering, sometimes referred to as electrical and electronic engineering, is a field of engineering that deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism....
 at MIT. He originated many of the concepts behind automatic-feedback control systems and the numerical control of machine tools. From 1959 to 1968, he served as the dean of MIT's engineering school
MIT School of Engineering

The MIT School of Engineering is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, USA....
. With his former student Donald P. Campbell, he wrote Principles of Servomechanisms in 1948, which is still a standard reference in the field.

y life Brown was born in 1907 in Australia.






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Gordon Stanley Brown (1907 in Australia
Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the Australia of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania, and numerous list of islands of Australia in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans....
 – 23 August 1996 in Tucson, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona

Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, Arizona, United States, located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix, Arizona and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border....
) was a professor of electrical engineering
Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering, sometimes referred to as electrical and electronic engineering, is a field of engineering that deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism....
 at MIT. He originated many of the concepts behind automatic-feedback control systems and the numerical control of machine tools. From 1959 to 1968, he served as the dean of MIT's engineering school
MIT School of Engineering

The MIT School of Engineering is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, USA....
. With his former student Donald P. Campbell, he wrote Principles of Servomechanisms in 1948, which is still a standard reference in the field.

Biography

Early life Brown was born in 1907 in Australia. He graduated from the Workingman's College (now the Royal Melbourne Technical College) at the age of 18 with diplomas in civil, electrical and mechanical engineering. In 1929, Brown entered MIT as a junior, and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1931. Continuing his studies at the Institute, he earned a master's degree in 1934 and a Ph.D, in 1938. His doctoral thesis subject was an analog computer
Analog computer

An analog computer is a form of computer that uses continuous physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved....
 called the Cinema Intergraph, written under the supervision of Harold L. Hazen.

MIT career Brown joined the MIT faculty in 1939 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. In the same year, he became a naturalized American citizen.

In 1940, Brown established the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT (now known as the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

The MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems is an interdisciplinary research laboratory of MIT, working on research in the areas of communications system, control theory, and digital signal processing combining faculty from the School of Engineering, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Department of Mathematics and...
). This laboratory did pioneering research into control systems for machines, which led to the automatic fire-control and aiming systems used during the Second World War. Brown and his staff was also involved in the development of Whirlwind
Whirlwind (computer)

The Whirlwind computer was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is the first computer that operated in real time, used computer monitor for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems....
, the first all-digital computer.

Brown was promoted to full professor in 1946 and served as the chairman of the MIT faculty from 1951 to 1952. In 1952, he became the chairman of the electrical engineering department and from 1959 to 1968, he served as the dean of the school of engineering. In 1973, Brown received the distinction of Institute Professor, MIT's highest academic honor.

Retirement Brown retired in 1974 as an emeritus professor of electrical engineering and Institute Professor Emeritus. He and his wife moved to Arizona, where he became involved with introducing computers and the ideas of system dynamics into classrooms.

In 1985, the building housing the Microsystems Technology Laboratories was named the Gordon Stanley Brown Building (Building 39).

Publications

  • 1948, Principles of Servomechanisms, with Donald P. Campbell. New York: Wiley.


External links

  • in the Tech
    The MIT Tech

    The Tech, first published on November 16, 1881, is the oldest and largest campus newspaper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts....