Background
Engineer and writer John Robinson Pierce was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1910. Known for
his work with radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, and
psychoacoustics, Pierce earned his bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees at the California
Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the 1930s. After finishing his PhD, Pierce worked at
Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1936 to 1971, then joined the faculty at Caltech where he
taught until 1980. Pierce was also a chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from
1979 to 1982. In 1983 he accepted a position as Visiting Professor of Music, Emeritus, at
the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. Pierce also
wrote science fiction under the names John Pierce, John R. Pierce, and J. J. Coupling. He
died in 2002 in Sunnyvale, California, from complications of Parkinson's Disease.
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