Dr. Gordon Stanley Brown

A professor of electrical engineering at MIT he originated many of the concepts behind automatic-feedback control systems and the numerical control of machine tools. From 1959 to 1968, he served as the dean of MIT's engineering school. With his former student Donald P. Campbell, he wrote Principles of Servomechanisms in 1948, which is still a standard reference in the field. He was born in 1907 in Australia and graduated from the Workingman's College (now the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) at the age of 18 with diplomas in civil, electrical and mechanical engineering. In 1929, he entered MIT as a junior, and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1931. Continuing his studies at the Institute, he earned a master's degree in 1934. Since 1931 he assisted Harold Hazen in constructing an electro-optical analog computer based on Norbert Wiener's "Cinema Integraph" concept. In 1933 his servomechanisms were displayed at the Century of Progress World Fair. In 1938 he received his Ph.D. for the study and making of the practical "Cinema Integraph", under tutelage of Hazen. He was promoted to full professor in 1946 and served as the chairman of the MIT faculty from 1951 to 1952. In 1952, he became the chairman of the electrical engineering department and from 1959 to 1968, he served as the dean of the school of engineering. In 1973, he received the distinction of Institute Professor, MIT's highest academic honor. He retired in 1974 as an emeritus professor of electrical engineering and Institute Professor Emeritus after which he and his wife moved to Arizona, where he became involved with introducing computers and the ideas of system dynamics into classrooms. In 1985, the building on MIT's campus housing the Microsystems Technology Laboratories was named the Gordon Stanley Brown Building (Building 39).