Джон Робинсон Пирс: Инженер, ученый и писатель-фантаст

American novelist

John Robinson Pierce (March 27, 1910 – April 2, 2002), was an American engineer and author. He did extensive work concerning radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. Additionally to his professional career he wrote science fiction for many years using the names John Pierce, John R. Pierce, and J. J. Coupling. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he earned his PhD from Caltech, and died in Sunnyvale, California, from complications of Parkinson's Disease.

After quitting Bell Laboratories, he joined California Institute of Technology as a professor of electrical engineering in 1971. Soon thereafter, he also accepted the position of Chief Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1980 he retired from Caltech and accepted his final job at Stanford's CCRMA. There he was prominent in the research of computer music, as a Visiting Professor of Music, Emeritus (along with John Chowning and Max Mathews). It was at Stanford that he became an independent co discoverer of the non octave musical scale that he later named the Bohlen–Pierce scale. Many of Pierce's technical books were intended to introduce a semi technical audience to modern technical topics. Among them are Electrons, Waves, and Messages; An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise; Waves and Ear; Man's World of Sound; Quantum Electronics; and Signals: The Science of Telecommunication. Pierce was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1955. In 1960, Pierce was awarded the Stuart Ballantine Medal. In 1962, Pierce received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. That same year, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1963, Pierce received the IEEE Edison Medal for "his pioneer work and leadership in satellite communications and for his stimulus and contributions to electron optics, travelling wave tube theory, and the control of noise in electron streams". He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1973. In 1975, he received the IEEE Medal of Honor for "his pioneering concrete proposals and the realization of satellite communication experiments, and for contributions in theory and design of traveling wave tubes and in electron beam optics essential to this success." In 1985, he was one of the first two recipients of the Japan Prize "for outstanding achievement in the field of electronics and communications technologies".

Besides his technical books, Pierce wrote science fiction using the pseudonym J. J. Coupling, which refers to the total angular momenta of individual particles. John Pierce also had an early interest in gliding and assisted the development of the Long Beach Glider Club in Los Angeles, one of the earliest glider societies in the United States. According to Richard Hamming "you couldn't talk to John Pierce without being stimulated very quickly". Pierce had been a resident of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, Pasadena, California, and later of Palo Alto, California. During his later years, as a visiting professor at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, he and his wife Brenda were known for having dinner parties in their Palo Alto home, in which they would invite an eclectic variety of guests and have lively discussions concerning topics ranging from space exploration to politics, health care, and 20th century music. One such dinner party was reported in This Is Your Brain On Music, written by Pierce's former student Daniel Levitin. The papers of John R. Pierce are at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. At his death Pierce was survived by his wife Brenda; a son—science fiction editor John Jeremy Pierce—and a daughter, Elizabeth Anne Pierce.