IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2023 - 78

Pioneers in CAS
Hans Jakob Piloty
H
ans Jakob Piloty came from an upper-class Munich
family of artists and scholars. In 1913, he
began studying electrical engineering at
the
Technical University of Munich. After volunteering in
the First World War, he obtained his diploma in 1921
and received his doctorate in 1923 under Leo Kadrnozka
(1872-1922). From 1925 he was chief engineer at AEG
Berlin. In the power plants department, he worked on
questions relating to energy transmission. In 1931 he
was appointed to the Chair for Electrical Measurement
Technology at TUM. In his institute, during the Nazi regime,
" war-important " orders in the field of telecommunications,
high-frequency technology and electroacoustics
were carried out for all three armed forces (army,
air force and navy).
After the Second World War he worked in Fort Monmouth,
a former installation of the Department of the
Army in Monmouth County, NJ, USA, for a few months
in 1947, but quickly returned to Munich to rebuild his
institute at TUM. From 1948 to 1951 he was the unencumbered
rector of the TUM. In 1955 he moved into a
new building for the Institute for Telecommunications
on Theresienstrasse.
Due to allied control rights, the development of
electronic computers was still notifiable. Under his
direction and that of the mathematician Robert Sauer,
the program-controlled electronic computer system
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCAS.2023.3234726
Date of current version: 12 April 2023
Munich (PERM) was built by a team of engineers and
mathematicians, including his son Robert Piloty, Walter
Proebster, Hans-Otto Leilich, Klaus Samelson, Heinz
Schecher and Friedrich L. Bauer, during 1952-1955.
Piloty received many awards including full membership
of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (1947),
Bavarian Order of Merit (1958), Honorary Doctorate
from the Technical University of Stuttgart (1961), VDE
(Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information
Technologies of Germany) Ring of Honor, the highest
award granted for merits in research and development
(1964), Gold Medal of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation
(1966) and Golden Ring of Honor of the Deutsche
Museum (1968).
Piloty retired in 1962. He and Sauer founded the Commission
for Electronic Computing (today Commission for
Computer Science) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
and Humanities in 1962, to which the Leibniz Computing
Center (LRZ) can be traced back. Hans Piloty died in
August 1969 at the age of 74.1
Prepared by Prof. Sanjit K. Mitra, University of California,
Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
Sanjit K. Mitra is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus
of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of
California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
1The above article is an English translation of the biography given at
the website: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Piloty
Pioneers in CAS (continued from page 79)
References
[1] A. Foelsing, Heinrich Hertz: Eine Biographie, Hoffmann und Campe,
Hamburg, Germany, 1997. In German.
[2] R. McCormmach, " H. R. Hertz, " in Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
Vol. 6: Jean Hachette-Joseph Hyrtl, C. C. Gillispie, Ed. New York, NY,
USA: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972, pp. 340-350.
[3] C. Susskind, " Hertz and the technological significance of electromagnetic
waves,'' Isis, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 342-345, 1965.
[4] C. Susskind, Heinrich Hertz - A Short Life, San Francisco, CA, USA:
San Francisco Press, 1995.
78
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
[5] H. R. Hertz, " Ueber sehr schnelle electrische Schwingungen,'' Annalen
der Physik, vol. 267, no. 7, pp. 421-448, May 1887.
[6] H. R. Hertz, " Ueber die Ausbreitungsgeschwindigkeit der electrodynamischen
Wirkungen,'' Annalen der Physik, vol. 270, no. 7, pp. 551-569,
May 1888.
[7] J.G. O'Hara, W. Pricha, Hertz and the Maxwellians: A Study and
Documentation of the Discovery of Electromagnetic Wave Radiation,
1873-1894. London, U.K.: Peter Peregrinus Ltd., 1987.
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