Eliahu Jury has passed away

EECS Prof. Emeritus and control systems pioneer, Eliahu Ibrahim Jury, who was active in the department from 1954 to 1981, passed away on September 20th at the age of 97.  Jury was born in Baghdad, Iraq, of Jewish parentage, and went to college first in Beirut, then in Palestine, where he obtained his undergraduate degree in 1947.  He moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school, earning an M.S. from Harvard and an Sc.D. from Columbia in electrical engineering in 1953 (the first time this degree was conferred at Columbia).  His dissertation, “Analysis and Synthesis of Sampled-Data Control Systems,” was one of the first documents to deal with the synthesis of sampled-data feedback systems.  He joined his friend Lotfi Zadeh at UC Berkeley the following year, and was made full professor in 1964.  During his 28 years at Berkeley, Jury flourished, making a number of groundbreaking contributions to the field of discrete-time systems and control, including the Jury stability table, his authoritative book “Theory and Application of the z -Transform Method,” and the theory of inners, which made of the cover of the July 1975 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE.  He received the American Society of Engineers (ASME) Rufus Oldenburger Medal, for lifetime achievements in automatic control, in 1986.  He retired from Berkeley in 1981, and moved to Florida where he joined the faculty at the University of Miami.  The EECS Eliahu Jury Award, which is presented to graduate students or recent alumni “for outstanding achievement in the area of systems, communications, control, or signal processing,” is named in his honor.