Frederick Vinton Hunt (February 15, 1905 – April 21, 1972) was an inventor, a scientist and a professor at Harvard University who worked in the field of acoustic engineering.

[1] He made significant contributions to room acoustics, regulated power supply, lightweight phonograph pickups and electronic reproduction equipment, and notably, during World War II, invented new techniques for sonar (an acronym that he invented, though the gloss was changed by others).

[7] In 1939, Hunt, Beranek and Maa[8] published a theory of the separate decay times of the normal modes of a rectangular room.

Demonstrating that the initial and asymptotic reverberant decay are governed by the non-grazing and grazing modes of the room, respectively.

In 1942, Admiral Louis McKeehan of the Mine Warfare Branch of the Bureau of Ordnance came to Hunt's Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory (HUSL) to seek Hunt's assistance with the development of a torpedo that could use acoustics to navigate toward an underwater submarine.

[11] Hunt and his students developed an architecture with two transducers, on either side of the nose cone; the "Mark 24 mine" sunk its first German submarine in late 1943.

Engelman changed the gloss for the word sonar (to Sound Navigation And Ranging), and wrote an internal Navy memo proposing the term.

[3] He was a member of its Executive Council from 1938-1941, and President from 1951-2,[17] and received the Gold Medal from the Acoustical Society of America in 1969.