Herbert J. Carlin

HERBERT J. CARLIN
FORMERLY OF ITHACA - Herbert J. Carlin, the J. Preston Levis Professor of Electrical Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University, and a leading authority in the fields of wideband circuit design and network theory, died on February 9th, in Walnut Creek, California. He was 91 years old.
Carlin was born in New York City and grew up in the Bronx. He received his B.S. degree from Columbia University and his M.S. from the Columbia University School of Electrical Engineering. He obtained his doctorate from The Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn where he later became chairman of the Department of Electrophysics. In 1966 he was invited to join the faculty of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY where he served as the Director of the School of Electrical Engineering from 1966 to1975. He remained at Cornell for the duration of his career.
Professor Carlin spent a year as a Senior Research Fellow at the Physics Laboratory of the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, was a Visiting Professor at M.I.T. in Cambridge, MA 1972-73, at Tianjin University in China the summer of 1983, at University College Dublin in 1991 and later that year at the Swiss Federal Inst. of Technology in Lausanne. He was a highly sought after expert in his field and his research helped advance the development of modern telecommunications technology.
He was an invited lecturer in many countries, among them, Italy, Great Britain, Hungary, Turkey and Japan. He served as Chairman of the IEEE Professional Group on Circuit Theory and received the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984. He published numerous articles and was senior author of the books Network Theory (Prentice Hall, 1964) and Wideband Circuit Design (CRC Press 1997).
Carlin was a passionate and informed music lover, whose wide ranging interest spread from classical music to blues and jazz. He played the piano and the flute and was a fiercely opinionated observer of baseball and politics. In addition to the dozens of doctoral students whose careers he nurtured, he had an immense influence on the minds and lives of his children and grandchildren.
Herbert Carlin is survived by his second wife of 35 years, Mariann; her two daughters, Andrea Szentirmai of Kansas City, MO, and Susan Oliker of Danville, CA; her son-in-law, Scott Oliker; Carlin's two sons from his first marriage to Esther Beth, Elliot, an attorney, of New York City and Seth, a professor of music, of St. Louis, MO; his daughters-in-law, Maryse and Marianne, and four grandchildren, Jacob Oliker and Annie, Tova and Daniel Carlin.