Robert Serrell

Biography

Robert Serrell (IRE Associate, 1935 and Senior Member, 1944) was born near Lyon, France, on 16 October 1904. He was a radio amateur in France in the 1920s. He received the E.E. degree from the Institut Normal Electrotechnique, Paris, in 1926.

Serrell was a Design Engineer at General Electric, Schenectady, New York, and at RCA, Camden, New Jersey, from 1927 to 1935. He was engaged in television engineering at RCA in Camden from 1935 to 1940, and was in charge of television transmitter development with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), in New York, in 1940 and 1941. Then Serrell spent about three years (1942 to 1945) as Group Leader and Consulting Engineer at the Radio Research Laboratory of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1944 to 1947, he was in charge of television operations at CBS. Serrell worked, from 1947 to 1953, at the Princeton Laboratories of RCA, engaged in research in applied mathematics and in electronic computer theory. Remaining with RCA, he Head of the RCA Computation Laboratory in Princeton, from 1953 to 1957.

In September 1957, Serrell became a consultant engaged in the design of special-purpose electronic computers and data-processing machines and in the development of mathematical inference techniques. In 1962, he was also a Research Associate of Haskins Laboratories, New York, New York.

During his career, Serrell served as Chairman of the IRE Electronic Computers Committee and was a member of Sigma Xi, the Association for Computing Machinery (Council member, too), the American Mathematical Society, and the New York Academy of Sciences.