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Charles Sidney Burrus “Sid” to almost everyone whose boyhood fascination with electricity set him on a path to become a pioneer in digital signal processing during a long and influential career at Rice University, died April 3.
Burrus ’57, the Maxfield and Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and former dean of engineering, was 86 years old.
“Rice engineering has lost one of the great ones,” said Bart Sinclair ’73 ’74 ’79, who retired in 2019 as senior associate dean of engineering after 50 years at Rice.
Among the many honors he amassed during 56 years on Rice’s faculty, Burrus won the annual George R. Brown Teaching Award six times. “Sidney was not just a popular lecturer,” Sinclair said. “He was a demanding one.”