In Memoriam: Professor Emeritus Arthur E. Laemmel

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering pays tribute to Professor Emeritus Arthur E. Laemmel, who died on June 1, 2014, after a career of several decades devoted to teaching and research at what was then known as Polytechnic. He was 90 years old.

Laemmel had been born in 1923 and came of professional age at one of the most consequential moments in the history of computing and communications: the years immediately following World War II, when the theoretical foundations of the Information Age were still being laid.

In 1949, he authored A General Theory of Communication: Report on Phase I of the Study of Data Transmission, produced under the auspices of the Microwave Research Institute at what was then known as the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn for the Watson Laboratories. The report appeared the year after Claude Shannon published his landmark mathematical theory of communication—a paper that gave birth to information theory as a discipline—and Laemmel's work placed him squarely at the frontier of those early efforts to formalize the science of data transmission. That he was conducting this research at Polytechnic, and for the military's Watson Laboratories, reflects both the school’s stature in applied science and the urgency with which the postwar era approached questions of communication and signal processing.

His faculty career in what would become the Department of Computer Science and Engineering spanned several decades. Over that time, he helped build a department and a discipline, teaching students the rigorous mathematical foundations of computing and communications during the years when those fields were still defining their own boundaries. He was ultimately named Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering—a recognition of a career of sustained scholarly and pedagogical commitment.

In the classroom, Laemmel was known for his intellectual rigor and mentorship abilities, and the students he taught went on to careers that bore his imprint, at a time when a grounding in information theory and computing was becoming foundational to nearly every domain of engineering and science.

Outside the university, Laemmel was a devoted family man; he married his wife, Ruth, in 1964, and she was his companion for the half-century that followed. He leaves behind a legacy in the discipline he helped to shape and the students he influenced.