REFLECTIONS In Memory of A . H . “ Steen ”

My brother, Augustine Heard “Steen” Gray Jr., died at home in Florence, Oregon, on 28 October 2019. From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, we shared several research interests, which gave me a front seat to and a peripheral role in what seemed to me a golden age of digital speech research. Our professional and personal lives were entangled, so I hope I may be forgiven for my natural bias in these reflections on my admiration and affection for Steen as a brother, teacher, colleague, writer, friend, and remarkable human being. Steen was born in Long Beach, California, in 1936 to Commander Augustine H. Gray, United States Navy, and Elizabeth Jordan Gray. As a Navy brat, he moved several times, living in Honolulu, Hawaii; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Newport, Rhode Island before settling in Coronado, California, in 1942. Steen graduated from Coronado High School in 1953, when he was given a Bank of America Science and Mathematics Award, a hint of his future interests. In 1959, Steen received his S.B. and S.M. degrees in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was part of the electrical engineering cooperative program (Course VI-A), working for General Electric several terms. His final project was logic design for ERMA, the first major banking computer. Following his graduation from MIT, Steen spent a year as a physics instructor at San Diego State College, teaching electronics and digital computer courses. I was a senior in high school that year and Steen let me audit his digital computer class, where I learned Boolean algebra, logic gates, and simple logical design. He was a natural teacher, and I learned that technical topics did not have to be boring. Steen also infected me with some of his musical tastes, most notably the Weavers and Pete Seeger, along with other folk music and blues gaining popularity in late 1950s California. Steen took me to a Pete Seeger concert, where I first saw and heard a 12-string guitar. I soon owned a Stella 12 string (sold by Sears). Steen met, courted, and married Mary Averill Forneret of Montréal, Canada, a graduate of McGill University. Steen decided to continue his graduate work, but his enjoyment of his mathematics courses at MIT led him to apply to the mathematics department instead of electrical engineering at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was turned down due to his lack of an undergraduate degree in math, but he was offered a compromise: admission to the Ph.D. program in the Department of Engineering Science, essentially an Applied Mathematics Department in the Division of Engineering. Steen accepted the offer, and he and Averill moved to Pasadena. In 1963, Steen and Averill’s son Augustine “Tino” Heard Gray III was born. In 1964, Steen received his Ph.D. degree from Caltech, and his dissertation “Stability and Related Problems in Randomly Excited Systems” provided more hints of his future work. He was appointed assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in July, the same month and year that the department was created. Steen and Averill moved to Santa Barbara and quickly immersed themselves in local activities, including the Get Oil Out (GOO) movement and the Santa Barbara Zoo. They made almost annual threeweek voyages in a large (often unreliable) recreational vehicle to visit Averill’s sister on Hornby Island off Vancouver Island, passing through and falling in love with Florence, Oregon, on their way. As one of the founding faculty members of the Electrical Engineering Department, Steen helped to build its academic program. He taught courses in circuits, numerical analysis, linear systems, transform techniques, digital signal processing, and complex variables. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2019. 2960460 Date of current version: 26 February 2020 Robert M. Gray