Martin H. Graham (July 12, 1926 – May 12, 2015) was an American professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) of the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

Biography

Martin Graham was born in Jamaica, Queens, in 1926. At the age of 16 he enrolled as a freshman at the

Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn The New York University Tandon School of Engineering (commonly referred to as Tandon) is the engineering and applied sciences school of New York University. Tandon is the second oldest private engineering and technology school in the United Sta ...

, New York. Then, he served in the

U.S. Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage o ...

as an electronic technician mate from 1944 to 1946. After completing service in the U.S. Navy, he studied electrical engineering under the GI Bill and became an instructor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. In 1948, he received a M.Sc. degree from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. He returned to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952. After working at the

Brookhaven National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base and Japanese internment c ...

as an engineer, he began an academic appointment at

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a private research university in Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranked among the top universities ...

in 1957, eventually rising to the rank of professor of electrical engineering and director of the Computer Project. He left Rice in 1966 and was appointed professor of electrical engineering at UC Berkeley that same year. He served as associate director of the Computer Center from 1966 to 1968, and chair of the Computer Science Department from 1970 to 1973. He also served as secretary of the Academic Senate from 1978 to 1980. He retired in 1993 but continued working from his office at Cory Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Graham died in 2015.

Scientific work

At the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Graham was a member of a team building an improved version of the Los Alamos

MANIAC Maniac (from Greek μανιακός, ''maniakos'') is a pejorative for an individual who experiences the mood known as mania. In common usage, it is also an insult for someone involved in reckless behavior. Maniac may also refer to: Film * ' ...

computer. Then, Graham became best known as project leader of the Rice Institute Computer R1 in Houston, Texas. At the time, he was mainly system- and hardware-oriented, drawing from his practical experience as an electronics technician and engineer. Graham changed his research focus in the 1960s while working at UC Berkeley from computer communications to the general areas of biomedical instrumentation. He participated in the establishment of a bioelectronics program at the EECS department. This effort evolved further as a joint program for biomedical engineering together with the

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It con ...

. Publications in this field concern

electrocardiograms Electrocardiography is the process of producing an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG), a recording of the heart's electrical activity. It is an electrogram of the heart which is a graph of voltage versus time of the electrical activity of the hear ...

or the galvanic skin reflex, but also of data transmission techniques. Numerous patents and publications resulted. Graham is also cited as the co-inventor of the GYO algorithm to test if a

hypergraph In mathematics, a hypergraph is a generalization of a graph in which an edge can join any number of vertices. In contrast, in an ordinary graph, an edge connects exactly two vertices. Formally, an undirected hypergraph H is a pair H = (X,E) w ...

is acyclic.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Graham, Martin 1926 births 2015 deaths UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Harvard University alumni Polytechnic Institute of New York University alumni