Vitold Belevitch
Born to parents fleeing the Bolsheviks, he settled in Belgium where he worked on early computer construction projects.
Belevitch is responsible for a number of circuit theorems and introduced the now well-known scattering parameters.
Belevitch was born 2 March 1921 in Terijoki, Karelia, now incorporated into Russia, but at the time part of Finland.
They were attempting to flee from their home in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in Russia to escape the Bolshevik revolution, which Belevitch's father opposed.
Belevitch's heavily pregnant mother succeeded in crossing the border into Finland and continued on to Helsinki after Vitold was born, where the birth was registered.
[2] Belevitch was educated in French in Belgium, until July 1936 at the Notre-Dame de la Paix College at Namur.
In 1937, aged 16, he enrolled at the Université Catholique de Louvain where he studied electrical and mechanical engineering, graduating in 1942.
His sponsor was Charles Lambert Manneback and his second advisor was Wilhelm Cauer, the founder of the field of network synthesis.
Belevitch showed his mathematical leanings by preferring the use of blackboard and chalk to any audio-visual aids during lectures.
Cauer was one of the leading circuit theorists of the day and at the time worked for Mix & Genest in Berlin, a sister company under the ITT umbrella.
Cauer died during the Second World War but Belevitch long after continued to consider his works to be the highest authority on matters of circuit theory.
[13] Belevitch dominated international conferences and was prone to asking searching questions of the presenters of papers, often causing them some discomfort.
Belgium was occupied by Nazi Germany for most of World War II and this prevented Belevitch from any communication with American colleagues.
It was only after the war that it was discovered that the same idea, under the scattering matrix name, had independently been used by American scientists developing military radars.
[15] Belevitch produced a textbook, Classical Network Theory, first published in 1968 which comprehensively covered the field of passive one-port, and multiport circuits.
In this work he made extensive use of the now-established S parameters from the scattering matrix concept, thus succeeding in welding the field into a coherent whole.
The book highlighted the difficulties for machine understanding of language for which there was some naive enthusiasm amongst cybernetics researchers in the 1950s.
This gives some insight into the reason why Zipf's law has been found experimentally to hold in such a wide variety of languages.
The test was subsequently generalised by Vasile M. Popov (in 1966), Belevitch (in Classical Network Theory, 1968) and Malo Hautus in 1969.
[26] Belevitch was a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and was vice-chair of the Benelux section when it was formed in 1959.
[29] Belevitch received an honorary doctoral degree in 1975 from the Technical University of Munich, and another from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1978.
