Among the recipients of the IT Society's Golden Jubilee
Awards for Technological Innovation was Dwight O. North,
who was cited for his invention of the matched filter.
Sadly, Dr. North died on June 26, 1998, just two
months before the awards were presented at ISIT'98 at
MIT. On September 8, former IT Society Presidents Vince
Poor and Sergio Verd\'u presented the award to Dr. North's
wife, Evelyn, at her home in Princeton, New Jersey.
Of course, the importance of the matched filter concept
in communications and signal processing hardly needs to
be repeated here. Dr. North was the first to formalize
this concept, which he published in a 1943 classified
report at RCA Labs in Princeton. (North did not use the name
``matched filter''. This term was coined by David Middleton and
J.H. Van Vleck, who independently published the result
a year after North in a classified Harvard Radio Research
Lab report.) North's report was later reprinted in the
{\it Proceedings of the IEEE}, in July 1963. This remarkable
report introduced not only the matched filter, but also the
Rice distribution, the concept of false alarms to set a detection
threshold, studies of pre-detection and post-detection
integration, among other topics. Its anticipation of so many
of the issues that occupied the attention of radar engineers for
many years is quite remarkable.
Dwight North, or Don (for his initials - D.O.N.) as he was
known to his friends and colleagues, was born in Hartford,
Connecticut, and was educated at Wesleyan University and
at Caltech, from which he received a Ph.D. in Physics in
1933. From 1934 until his retirement in 1974, he worked
for RCA, first in Harrison, New Jersey, and then as an original
member of the technical staff at RCA's Princeton labs when
they were established in 1942. His interest in noise problems
began during the 1930's when he worked on the study of noise
in vacuum tubes operating in the 100MHz band, work being conducted
at RCA during its development of commercial television.
(His interest in noise problems even extended to the naming
of the street on which he was a longtime resident in Princeton:
Random Road - so named because many of its original residents
were RCA "noise" experts, including Dwight North.) During
World War II, he worked at the MIT Radiation Lab on the
development of radar. After the war, he turned to the study
of solid state physics, which occupied most of the remainder
of his career at RCA.
According to Evelyn North, Dr. North was typically uninterested
in organizational recognitions of his work. However, when he
was informed of the Golden Jubilee award in a letter from Society
President Thomas Ericsson, he was reportedly very pleased
to be recognized in this way. Although Dwight North did not labor
long in our field, in inventing the matched filter he left a legacy
that will undoubtedly last into the very distant future.