Michael Harrison has passed away

EECS Professor Emeritus Michael A. Harrison passed away on Saturday, June 7. He was 89.

Professor Harrison earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1963. That same year, he joined the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor and spent most of his academic career at Berkeley, retiring in 1994.

He was widely known for his contributions to automata theory, formal languages, and sequential machines. His 1965 textbook, “Introduction to Switching and Automata Theory,” became a standard in the field. Other notable books include “Lectures on Linear Sequential Machines” (1969), “Introduction to Formal Language Theory” (1978), and “The Technology War” (co-authored with David Brandon, 1987). Over the course of his career, he authored more than 200 technical publications.

In 1989, Professor Harrison co-founded Gain Technology with his former Ph.D. student, Pehong Chen, to commercialize their research on multimedia document authoring systems. Their flagship product, GainMomentum, won the SunWorld Prize for Best Product in 1992. Gain Technology was later acquired by Sybase, Inc.

Professor Harrison held numerous leadership roles in the computing community. He served as Vice President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a member of the Computer Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council, a director and trustee of the Charles Babbage Institute, and a consulting editor for Addison-Wesley. He also served on editorial boards of major journals and many program and advisory committees.

He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.

Professor Harrison is survived by his wife, EECS Professor Susan Graham, and his son, Craig.