Charles Lynn Wayne

1943 - 2024

Charles Lynn Wayne died at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on November 23, 2024. He had pulmonary fibrosis and heart disease.

Charles was born in Lake City, Florida, in 1943. His father, also Charles Wayne, was a pilot stationed at the Naval Air Station there. His mother, Dorothy Rodenhausen Wayne, was a homemaker and an accomplished artist. As his dad moved from assignment to assignment, Charles grew up in Guam, Philadelphia, Washington, Providence, and Norfolk. He'd lived in Maryland since 1967.

Charles attended St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware, and went on to MIT where he earned a degree in electrical engineering. After graduation he went to work at the National Security Agency, where he remained for over 40 years, with a two-year interruption for Army service in Korea.

Early in his NSA career he was a recipient of that agency's Meritorious Civilian Service Award. The citation spoke cryptically of the "inestimable value" of his group's work, which produced valuable intelligence for over a decade.

For Charles the most fulfilling part of his career was his tenure as a Program Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 1988-1992 and 2001-2005. He received the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Civilian Service for his second DARPA term.

Research on speech and language processing was in disfavor when he first began serving at DARPA. Along with other "artificial intelligence" related research, it was considered highly speculative and unlikely to yield useful results. By introducing well-defined, objective tests by which all funding recipients were evaluated, he was able to dramatically increase support for speech and language research. He also gave researchers a metric that inspired the outpouring of productive research leading to the human language technology that we now take for granted.

Charles was an avid player of Go, the ancient Chinese board game. A few years before his death he began assembling a group of players, experienced and beginners, who met together to deepen their understanding of the game. This gave him great pleasure in his final years. He was also a voracious reader, enjoying both history and fiction. He belonged to the same reading group for almost 30 years. He was a member of the Cosmos Club.

Charles is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Barbara Hatfield. A sister, Pamela Wayne Murphy, died in 2003. Two sons survive him, Leonard (Angela Bradbery) and Andrew (Florence Kao), and also two grandsons, Vincent and Gregory.

A memorial service will be held on
February 15. For more information, please write to charleswaynememorial@gmail.com. His ashes will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery at a later date.