Dr. Conrad (Conny) Palm

A Swedish electrical engineer and statistician, known for several contributions to teletraffic engineering and queueing theory. He enrolled at the School of Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1925, being awarded his M.Sc. (1940) and Ph.D (1943) on a dissertation entitled Intensit?tsschwankungen im Fernsprechverkehr. His work was also joint with L. M. Ericsson, cooperating with Christian Jacob?us. He attended Harald Cram?r's queueing theory group, met William Feller (1937). Later, he was in the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery (Matematikmaskinn?mnden), where he led the project that developed the first Swedish computer, the BARK (1947?51), informally referred to as CONIAC (for his first name plus Integrator And Calculator). He was adjunct professor in telecommunications at Royal Institute of Technology as well. Professor H?kan Sterky, who was his thesis advisor, has characterised him as a bohemian and a brilliant statistician. He had started his research before he graduated, which seemed to be due to a lack of interest for some undergraduate courses rather than the level of difficulty of the courses. To apply pressure on him, it was finally agreed that his monthly salary from Ericsson would only be paid out if he had passed one of his remaining undergraduate exam that month. Sterky related how he would typically show up a few days before pay day wishing to sit for an oral exam.