Professor Carver Andress Mead

Born in Bakersfield, California, he is a prominent U.S. computer scientist. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), having taught there for over 40 years. He studied electrical engineering at Caltech, getting his B.S. in 1956, his M.S. in 1957, and his Ph.D. degree in 1960. He co-wrote the landmark text Introduction to VLSI systems with Lynn Conway in 1980, an important spearhead of the Mead & Conway revolution. A pioneering and well-written textbook, it has been used in VLSI integrated circuit education all over the world for decades. He is credited by Intel's (at that time Fairchild Semiconductor's) Gordon Moore of coining the term Moore's Law, denoting the observation/prediction Moore did in 1965 about the growth rate of the transistor amount fitting on a single integrated circuit. He also pioneered the use of floating-gate transistors as a means of non-volatile storage for neuromorphic and other analog circuits. He has developed an approach he calls Collective Electrodynamics in which electromagnetic effects, including quantized energy transfer, derived from the interactions of the wavefunctions of electrons behaving collectively. In this formulation, the photon is a non-entity, and Planck's energy?frequency relationship comes from the interactions of electron eigenstates. The approach is related to John Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, to the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and to Gilbert N. Lewis's early description of electromagnetic energy exchange at zero interval in spacetime.