Arthur Gill

Arthur Gill (born Arthur Glovazky in Haifa, Israel) was a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1960 to 1991. He was one of the first professors whose research spanned both electrical engineering and computer science, and he was a member of both the EE and CS divisions when the EECS department formed in 1968. His research focused on network analysis and synthesis, communication theory, system theory, and computer science. Arthur Gill died on March 21, 2020.

Prof. Gill served as the Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Affairs in the College of Engineering from 1981 to 1991. During this time, he was the first faculty ‘supervisor’ of the Computer Science Reentry Program, an early, innovative, and successful effort to increase the number of women and minority students studying CS. He was a member of the Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) for the entirety of his career, where he worked on system theory and computer science problems.

He received his B.S. in 1955 and his M.S. in 1956, both in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked at the Research Division of the Raytheon Company in Waltham, Massachusetts from 1956-57, where he was engaged primarily with semiconductor circuitry design. Between 1958 and 1960, he was also a member of the Advanced Programming Development Division of the Bendix Aviation Corporation, where he worked on the development of the G-15 computer. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley in 1959 under the mentorship of Aram Thomasian, and spent the next thirty years of his career as a professor at Berkeley until his retirement in 1991.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Prof. Gill spent abroad: first in India, as part of the Kanpur Indo-American Program, under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, working on the development of an electrical engineering curriculum and laboratories in the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur; then in Italy, as a guest lecturer at the International Summer School on Automata Theory in Ravello, and later as a Guggenheim Fellow at the Centro Di Cibernatica of the University of Naples studying the interrelation between automata theory, information theory and reliability; and finally in Brazil, as a visiting professor in the postgraduate engineering school of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Prof Gill was the author of a number of books including "Introduction to the Theory of Finite-State Machines" (McGraw-Hill, 1962), "Linear Sequential Circuits: Analysis, Synthesis and Applications" (McGraw-Hill, 1967), "Applied Algebra for the Computer Sciences" (Prentice-Hall, 1976), "Machine and Assembly Language Programming of the PDP-11" (Prentice-Hall, 1976 and 1983), and a co-author of "Assembly Language Programming for the 68000" (Prentice-Hall, 1987). Most of these books were translated into Russian and Chinese. He is also the author of numerous journal articles in the areas of systems and computer sciences.