SIMON HAYKIN

(JANUARY 6, 1931 ? APRIL 13, 2025) Prof. Simon Haykin (born Sahir Sabir Hakim on January 6, 1931, in Kirkuk, Kurdistan) received his BSc (First-class Honours), PhD, and DSc, all in Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham, England. His PhD thesis (1956) was entitled "Optical techniques applied to the investigation of certain aspects of electric breakdown in liquids." He was appointed as a professor of electrical and computer engineering at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, in 1965 and in more recent years served as a Distinguished University Professor at McMaster. Prof. Haykin was a noted authority on adaptive and learning systems. He pioneered signal-processing techniques and systems for radar and communication applications, and authored several fundamental textbooks in those fields. From 1972 to 1993, he served as the founding director of McMaster University's Communications Research Laboratory. Continually developing new curricula, Prof. Haykin created innovative courses in emerging fields: neural networks, Bayesian sequential state estimation, and space-time communication theory. He often ceded lead authorship to his students and fostered their career development through industrial collaboration. Throughout his prolific career, Prof. Haykin authored more than fifty influential books, including Adaptive Filter Theory (5th ed., 2014) and Neural Networks and Learning Machines (3rd ed., 2011), which continue to be foundational texts in both academia and industry. All along, he had the vision of revisiting the ?elds of radar and communications from a totally-new perspective. That vision became a reality in the early years of this century with the publication of two seminal journal papers: "Cognitive Radio: Brain-empowered Wireless communications" (2005) and "Cognitive Radar: A Way of the Future" (2006). Prof. Haykin was an outstanding educator of generations of undergraduate and graduate students through his renowned text books and engaging lectures. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was the recipient of the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences from ETH Zentrum, Zurich, Switzerland (1999), the Henry Booker Gold Medal from Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale (URSI, 2002), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal (2016), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Dennis J. Picard Medal (2021) and many other medals and prizes. He was married to the late Teresa Veronica O'Gorman (1933 ? 1976), and is survived by his two children Michael A. G. Azad Haykin and Juanné E. Kochhar and their respective spouses Alison E. Haykin and Ashok Kochhar-his four grandchildren, Victoria and Nigel Haykin & Arun and Ajay Kochhar, and their respective spouses, Sharon Haykin, Anisha Kochhar, and Kanika Kochhar-and his three great-grandchildren, Veer Kochhar, Meera Kochhar, and Adira Kochhar.