News

2020. 12. 31

In Memory of Prof. Omar Wing (1928-2020)

All of us in the Department of Information Engineering have learned with sorrow that our respected and beloved Professor Omar Wing has left us. Professor Wing was the founding Dean of our Engineering Faculty. He was Professor Emeritus of Information Engineering, serving at the Faculty from 1991 to 1998 and was the IE Department Chairman during 1991-92. He had made significant contributions to both the Faculty and the department. He will be sorely missed.

Professor Wing received his B.S. from the University of Tennessee in 1950, M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1952 and EngSc.D. from Columbia University in 1959. He was the Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering of Columbia University, where he had been a faculty member of the Department of Electrical Engineering there from 1956 to 1993, and served as Department Chairman two terms from 1974-78 and 1983-86.

He was the author or co-author of 58 journal papers published mostly in the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems. He was also the author and co-author of 100 conference papers presented mostly in the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. He had published three textbooks in circuit theory and one in GaAs circuit design.

He supervised the completion of 30 Ph.D. theses in such subjects as graph theory, distributed parameter circuit theory, sparse matrix techniques, and computer-aided analysis and design of very large scale integrated circuits.

Professional experiences include serving as President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (1978), Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems (1975-77), and the General Chairman of the First IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (1968).

Industrial experiences comprise four years at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1952 to 1956, where he did research and development work on the design of electric filters for anti-submarine defense and microwave filters for long-distance communications. He was a consultant at Bell Laboratories at various times after becoming a faculty member at Columbia University. As a consultant, he worked on design automation of very large-scale integrated circuits and modeling of the metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor for high-speed operations.

Since 1979, he held Visiting Professorships at universities in China, Denmark, England, the Netherlands, and India at various times. Most recently, he was Visiting Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2000, and at Fudan University in 2001 and 2002, teaching and doing research in radio frequency circuit design and simulation.

Professor Wing left peacefully on 28 December 2020. His contributions to engineering live on, and he would always remain in our hearts.


 

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