Abstract
Looking back on my early experiences as a young engineer, I am reminded how little my colleagues and I appreciated that what we did would change the world, for better and for worse. I am also reminded how Marcel Golay, one of my early mentors, understood the duality of technology and how it plays a large part in its application for the right purpose. Born in Switzerland in 1902, Golay received his engineering degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the same college from which Einstein graduated. He is best known for the invention of the Golay cell used in gas chromatography and optical spectroscopy, the development of the Savitzky?Golay smoothing filter, the discovery of Golay codes, the generalization of the perfect binary Hamming codes to nonbinary codes, and his work on the complementary sequence autocorrelation functions used in Wi-Fi and 3G standards and on the Golay hexagonal nearest-neighbor logic used in pattern recognition schemes, of which I had the good fortune to be a part.
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