Gordon Kraft: Man in Control

by Allen Drake

Author's note: Fil Glanz wrote an article on Gordon that appeared in the 1993 issue of Signals & Noise. Articles in the 1998 and 1999 issues cover his work in vibration control. This is both an update and a look at Gordon's life from a somewhat different view, but for those of you who don't recall the first article, some of the details are repeated here.

Leon Gordon Kraft III was born on July 7, 1948, in Salem, Massachusetts, right next to Danvers, where he grew up. Gordon was named Best Looking Baby of the Year for 1948 by the local paper, and for that early achievement his mother was awarded $100.00 plus a washing machine. Most of Gordon’s relatives live in New Hampshire, where he spent many days in the Hanover area learning to ski, tented on Province Lake, hiked Mount Monadnock and visited grandparents at Mascoma Lake. He graduated from Danvers High in 1966 and went on to take a year at Philips Exeter Academy, where he received the only A in his advanced math class.

Gordon's undergraduate work was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia ("Penn"), where he majored in electrical engineering at the Moore School. This school was made especially famous by the ENIAC, an early computer, still on display there.

After his 1971 graduation from Penn, he enrolled in UNH's EE Department for a master's degree in controls. Dave Meeker in Math was his advisor. In 1973 he graduated from UNH with his master's and went to the University of Connecticut's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for a Ph.D. in controls. Dave Lindorff functioned as his major advisor, but he was assisted by Charlie Knapp, Dave Kleinman, Yaakov Bar Shalom, and Dave Jordan. Before he received his Ph.D. in 1977, Gordon worked for United Technologies Research Center in East Hartford, Connecticut, designing a wind turbine speed controller. For a year and a half he then worked for MIT's Lincoln Labs in Lexington, Massachusetts, and in the fall of 1978 he was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at UNH. In 1983 he was promoted to Associate Professor, and in 1991 he made Professor.

Gordon remembers his earlier years in the workforce, when his good looks of 1948 did not seem to help much. His first job was picking strawberries at 25 cents an hour for Frank Lupinski in what was known as Oniontown (Danvers). He also delivered newspapers to 114 houses at three cents per house, made change at Salem Willows, an amusement park, and mopped floors at Salem Hospital. He even remembers mopping the floor of the room he was born in.

Even more pleasurable are his memories of baseball. From when he was eight, he played baseball or softball (and sometimes both) for Little League, Danvers High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Penn, and extra-curricular teams. In high school he was a member of the Ferncroft team, part of the Twilight League, the oldest continuing baseball league in the country, and it was during this period that he played against Tony Conigliaro and his brother Billy (future Red Sox players). Gordon still plays on summer league teams to this day, and it was a great disappointment for him to see UNH terminate its varsity baseball team a couple of years ago.

The apple did not fall far from the tree for Gordon, for his father, Jake Kraft, was an EE who attended Penn and MIT (master's from the Radiation Lab), after which he worked for MIT 35 years. Jake Kraft's picture was in the December 1997 IEEE Spectrum for radar astronomy research in the 1950s. He is also credited with the "Kraft Inequality" in information and coding theory textbooks. Gordon's father's father, his mother's father, and his great grandfather were all mechanical engineers. His talent for teaching came partially from his father, who had done some teaching himself, but he was inspired even more by his mother Dorothy "Dot" Kimball Kraft, a devoted math teacher, a 1943 grad of UNH, and later a trustee of the university.

Gordon married Sharon Hague in 1973, and they had three daughters: Beth, who is in pre-med at North Carolina State; Lauren, who is a business major at Clemson; and Kate, who is entering UNH this fall as a science teaching major. All three are outstanding athletes and have done exceedingly well academically. With much deserved pride Gordon can reel off their sports statistics, GPAs, and amounts of their scholarships. It's hard to imagine a more supportive father.

At UNH Gordon has won numerous teaching awards, which may seem strange in light of the fact that he hated his own EE undergraduate experience. The depth of material and total workload seemed too much for anyone to absorb. On second thought, however, perhaps it was precisely this experience that makes him such a good instructor. He realizes that the material has to be paced slower and with better intuitive explanations than he received. Nevertheless, it is still a wonder that Gordon even considered grad school. When he graduated from Penn, he had two offers, one to work for Nashua Corporation, and one to work for Philadelphia Electric Company. For some reason he chose neither but decided to paint houses for the summer. It seems also a fluke that he decided to apply to the UNH master's program at such a late date, but Alden Winn spent the whole day with him when he came to check the department out, and financial support came out of practically nowhere at the last minute through the good offices of Dick Skutt.

At UNH Gordon worked exceedingly hard taking courses, being a teaching assistant, and doing research, and he actually came to like it. It's not surprising then that Gordon often gives talks to seniors touting the benefits of going on to grad school, a situation particularly relevant to today's students, who get offered so much by industry without graduate degrees. During his master's program at UNH, it suddenly occurred to Gordon that he could make a career out of doing what he was enjoying so much (teaching and research)—by becoming a professor. Though he was discouraged about the probability of success, he decided the risk was worth it and applied to Ph.D. programs at UConn and UMass. Again through the influence of a single individual, Dave Lindorff at UConn, Gordon chose that school. It's interesting that this professor who had such an influence on Gordon would eventually leave electrical engineering and pursue a career in psychology.

True to his goal, Gordon applied to UNH for a faculty position after he received the Ph.D. at UConn and interviewed during the Blizzard of '78. While there was much competition (65-70 candidates), Gordon finished near the top, but not at the top, and someone else was chosen. However, quite unexpectedly another faculty member quit and Gordon was recruited.

In research Gordon has been exemplary. With Tom Miller and Fil Glanz he formed the Robotics Lab. He has received three major NSF grants: one in robotics, one in CMAC neural networks, and one in vibration control. Right now he's working to control noise in submarine hulls. For the future he is thinking of ways to apply vibration control schemes to sports equipment; for example, to extend the "sweet spot" on a baseball bat, to "tune" a tennis racquet on the fly, or to adjust a ski for the terrain. He's also always thinking of how to improve engineering education by putting some of the fun back in.

How does Gordon see his future? Last August he surprised many of his friends by marrying Barbara Pelliccia, who just received her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from UNH. His recounting of the ceremony and beautiful scenery in Banff, Alberta, Canada, near Lake Louise was fascinating. Gordon still loves New Hampshire and UNH, but in 2010 at 62 he will have been here 32 years, his daughters will be through college, and there won't be an awful lot to keep him around. He's discouraged with the latest faculty contract negotiations and disagrees with certain trends in the administration, such as cutting the baseball team and de-emphasizing engineering and agriculture. Since virtually everyone in Gordon’s family has gone to UNH at one point, he feels that UNH is more than just a liberal arts school. It is a major state university that should strive to meet the needs of all New Hampshire students. He feels UNH should be better appreciated (and funded) by the state of New Hampshire.

So Gordon is developing some collateral interests and extending those already in place. He's still playing baseball, and he's doing some fishing, but he's getting more interested in warmer climates and restoring a 1947 Willys Jeep. Civil War history intrigues him, particularly the life of Joshua Chamberlain, a professor of English at Bowdoin, who, instead of going on a sabbatical to England, changed his plans and joined the Union Army. At Little Roundtop, he led 280 men without ammunition to rout an overwhelming Confederate force. Chamberlain, who later became governor of Maine, was specially recognized by Grant at Lee's surrender and later gave a speech about the rarity of one people's fighting for another people's rights. Gordon is also impressed with Chamberlain's influence in the respect accorded to the Confederate troops by the Union soldiers at the end of the war.

Gordon himself is a fascinating study in the human aspect of engineering and engineering education. Students are aware that they will get a sympathetic ear when they talk to him, and he is without doubt the reason many have gone on to grad school, to say nothing of those who have continued undergraduate studies in the face of daunting work loads and discouraging grades. We can use a lot more of his kind.