Collected memories

Carver and I were both members of Blacker House.

I have followed his amazing career for years.

His talent has been of inestimable value to the world.

I only heard Professor Mead lecture twice: the first time in 1970 when I was helping with a new class he was teaching to freshmen and then again in 1994 or thereabouts at a conference at Asilomar. I was a senior at that first lecture, listening to Carver explain things about electricity to frosh in a way that I hadn't heard in 3+ years at 'Tech or anywhere else. I felt like my EE education was now complete and I could design whatever electric circuit that needed designing. His intuition and...

Quotation of Chairman Mead:

"Ignorance is not a position of strength."

All auditory processing starts with a cochlea. Silicon auditory processing must start with a silicon cochlea. The fundamental structure in a cochlea is the cellular membrane. The silicone basilar membrane is a transmission line with a velocity of propagation that can be tuned electrically. Output taps, where the signal can be observed, are located at intervals alone the line. We can think about the taps as crude inner hair cells. Unfortunately, we have about 3500; we will be lucky to have...

Found in an EAS annual report '72-'73, with a caption saying:

Carver Mead, professor of Electrical Engineering, giving oral examination to undergraduate student Howard Bubb as part of course EE 10 - Digital Electronics Laboratory. EE 10 offers freshman students an introductory unstructured laboratory designed to provide an opportunity to work on projects related to digital electronics. The student is required to design, build, and test his own digital system.

It was the first day of graduate school, in the first class, in the then brand-new CS department. Two thirds of the faculty, cornered me: that is to say, Carver and Fred Thompson. "Do you know what your thesis topic will be?" they demanded.

I knew both Fred and Carver from undergraduate days, so the respectful thing was to ask their opinion rather than proffer my own.

"We think you should figure out how to implement Fred's systems with Carver's chips," they said.

"Funny," I...

Always wanting to be as close to the phenomenon under study as possible, during Carver's study of the vertebrate retina and his development of the silicon retina, he would visit the lab of Frank Werblin at UC Berkeley. Here, in my lab, as I used whole cell patch clamp techniques in the retinal slice preparation to measure light-driven synaptic currents and voltage responses of single, identified neurons, Carver's presence, penetrating mind, and his ability to conceptualize have been a...

I met Carver at National Semiconductor through Gil Amelio who asked us to develop imagers.

The group included Min Hwa Chi, Hosam Haggad and myself from National and Tobi Delbruck, and Carver. Dick Merrill would join later on.

Those few years were the best in my life at work

Dear Carver, thanks for sharing and leaving that precious time in my memory

I will never forget you.

Love. Albert

Carver Mead receiving the 2002 National Medal of Technology from President Bush.

Discovered a 1912 crossarm in a swamp in upstate New York.

http://www.caltech.edu/content/life-caltech-lifer

Carver at a private dinner to celebrate his 80th birthday on May 3, 2014.