Karl Ingard

I only discovered today, March 28, 2020, that Professor Ingard had died about six years ago. I was sorry to learn that because I have wanted all the MIT faculty who taught me to live on, if not as I knew them, then at least as others knew them. I sat many an hour through 8.01 and 8.02 lectures delivered in 26-100 by this always well prepared lecturer. He walked into the lecture hall like a man on top of his game, with wonderfully upright posture, a calm and serious look on his face, and without lecture notes! We students measured professors by their preparedness and Prof. Ingard was the epitome of preparedness. I don't remember any instances of students raising their hands and correcting an equation he had written on the board. We admired him. When his book with William Kraushaar finally reached the "ready to be properly presented as a true textbook stage," and was published by Addison-Wesley, I was curious to compare it with the careworn copy of the preliminary text that I had had to learn from three years before. What a wonderful step forward from my version was that final version! I have it in my library and consult it nowadays still. Students in those years '58-'59 tended to look upon their professors as unapproachable and I certainly would never have taken advantage of Prof. Ingard's office hours. The people who were approachable in my mind were the TAs who assisted with the course. Mine was a graduate student named Hale Bradt, who was most approachable and who communicated his humanness to us one Saturday morning at recitation when no one could solve a homework problem not even he. With the utmost humility he looked out at us and said, "Gosh fellas, I don't know!" (Fellas because MIT was then essentially a mens' college.} Mr. Bradt became Dr. Bradt and then Professor Bradt, and ultimately Professor emeritus Bradt, having learned much, I believe, from his time with Professors Ingard and Kraushaar in 8.01 and 8.02. It is men like Professor Ingard that made my undergraduate years at MIT worthwhile. May he be remembered well by all of those whose lives he touched.

A wonderful, brilliant man who loved his family. Our thoughts and love to all.