MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science EECS Great Educators

Professor Y. W. Lee ranks high among the eminent scholars of our department during the post-World War II era. His outstanding accomplishments were in the fields of modern network theory and statistical communication theory. His pioneering work in statistical communication came during a time of heightened interest in the development of advanced electrical-communication concepts. Professor Norbert Wiener expounded highly creative ideas on this subject, but it was Professor Lee who undertook the job of interpreting Wiener's abstractions and difficult mathematics and transforming them into practicable electrical science.

Born in Macao, China, in 1904, he received the S.B. degree in 1927, the S.M. degree a year later and the Sc.D. degree in 1930, all at MIT. Following a year of work as an engineer in American industry, he returned to his homeland, where he taught electrical engineering at universities in Peiping and Shanghai.

After enduring the chaotic conditions in his country, and making countless efforts to emigrate, Professor Lee was finally able to return to MIT in 1946 as Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering, a position that had been offered to him several years earlier. He was appointed Associate Professor in 1948 and Professor in 1960. He became a U.S. citizen in 1952.

During his career, Professor Lee was the author of some twenty-five papers; two received unusually high acclaim. Synthesis of Networks by means of Fourier Transforms of LaGuerre's Functions, published in 1932, was based on his doctoral thesis. It was a seminal piece of work often cited by others in their discussions of modern network theory. It is believed that he was the first to use the term synthesis to describe the process of assembling an array of elements to meet a specific set of performance requirements. The part of his paper dealing with network synthesis is closely related to three patents awarded to him jointly with Professor Norbert Wiener, his mentor and life-long collaborator.

A second paper, entitled Applications of Statistical Methods to Communications Problems, was published as a Research Laboratory of Electronics report in 1950. The demand for this paper was unusually high -- some 2,000 copies were distributed to researchers in the United States and throughout the world.

His 1960 book, "Statistical Theory of Communication," was the culmination of more than a decade of research on this subject. With probability theory and generalized harmonic analysis as its foundation, the book represented a major milestone in the history of communication theory.

Professor Lee was a pleasant, mild-mannered person with a wry sense of humor. These qualities, together with his excellent skill in organizing classroom material, his enthusiasm for his subject, and his meticulous attention to details in order to ensure rigor, made him one of the great teachers of our department. His graduate subjects on the statistical theory of communication and the statistical theory of nonlinear systems were taken by generations of students over a period of twenty years. They were among the most popular of that era.

His graduate subjects were also the mechanism for attracting the most highly qualified doctoral students to his research group. In his dealings with his doctoral students, he always encouraged them to assume as much initiative as possible. By being prompt in evaluating the soundness of their ideas, he helped them avoid potential pitfalls, and stay focused on their objectives. A substantial part of our department's enviable record of achievements in the field of statistical communication is attributable to the research and teaching contributions of Professor Lee.

Professor Lee lectured extensively on statistical communications theory at industrial organizations and government laboratories, and at universities here and abroad. He received an honorary Doctorate of Applied Science from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, and was a Fellow in the Institute of Radio Engineers, the predecessor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. His Fellow Award in 1961 was "For contributions to communication theory and engineering education."

After his retirement in 1969, Professor Lee took up residence in California, where he remained until he died in November, 1989, at the age of 85.