Cellphone Pioneer, Wife to Give USC $52 Million
Andrew J. Viterbi, a renowned engineer and wireless communications magnate, and his wife, Erna, will donate $52 million to the University of Southern California, which will name its engineering school for the couple.
A co-founder of San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc., Viterbi pioneered technology used in cellular telephones throughout the world. He earned his doctorate in electrical engineering at USC in 1962.
The gift enhances USC’s effort to be considered among the nation’s top engineering schools, along with such institutions as Caltech, MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley. The one-time cash gift, which will be announced Tuesday in a ceremony on campus, will go to the engineering school’s endowment, which now stands at $120 million.
Just as important as the boost to the school’s endowment is the cachet of Viterbi’s name, said C.L. Max Nikias, dean of the engineering school. “The name raises our visibility and reputation instantly. Viterbi is a big name in both academic circles and industry.”
In 1967, Viterbi published the Viterbi algorithm, which allows the rapid decoding of overlapping signals. In one of its most successful commercial applications, the algorithm enables numerous cellular phones to communicate without interfering with each other. The algorithm is employed in hundreds of millions of cellular phones today.
Erna Viterbi recalled in an interview with USC officials that her husband came up with the algorithm in the midst of a celebration of the Jewish holiday Purim. Their children had just taken first-prize in a costume contest, but Andrew was fixated on a scrap of paper on which he had been scribbling.
“I’d made them the costumes and I really had to try to get him out of this thing he was working on,” she said, but her husband remained focused on his work. “And I said, ‘So, did you come up with something really?’ ”
Andrew, she said, replied, “Yeah, but I thought about it, it’s really nothing major.”
The algorithm and other scientific achievements earned Viterbi numerous honors including membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Before co-founding Qualcomm in 1985 with Irwin M. Jacobs (for whom UC San Diego’s engineering school is named), Viterbi was an engineering professor at UCLA and UC San Diego.
He credited much of his success to his teaching experience. “The best research often comes out when you’re thinking about what you’re going to teach your graduate students,” he said.
Both Andrew and Erna Viterbi came to the United States as refugees; he from Italy, she from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Andrew Viterbi arrived at age 4 with his parents in New York. His father soon opened an ophthalmology practice in Boston, where Viterbi glimpsed the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology across the Charles River in Cambridge, and decided at age 10 he would attend the school.
After graduating from Boston Latin School, a storied public high school founded in 1635, Viterbi enrolled at MIT. He began work at Raytheon while an MIT student, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the school.
After finishing at MIT in 1957, Viterbi took a job as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Viterbi had hoped to study for a doctorate at Caltech, but that institution would have required him to enroll full time, he said. USC allowed him to enroll in its doctoral program and continue to work full time at JPL.
Viterbi fondly recalled those years as a kind of Golden Age for engineering in Southern California.
The thriving aerospace industry “recruited the best talent, encouraged them and treated them professionally,” he said. Andrew also met Erna in Los Angeles through one of her cousins; the couple’s first date was at the Coconut Grove nightclub.
The Viterbis also are active supporters of MIT and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.
In San Diego, they have contributed generously to private schools attended by their grandchildren, but have kept their names off buildings to spare the children any awkwardness. Viterbi said he had no such reservations about the engineering school taking the family name. “I’m not that shy,” he said.
Andrew Viterbi said that MIT is “recognized pretty generally as No. 1” but that USC’s current momentum as a rising Top 10 school means the couple’s gift “will do more to further engineering and engineering education -- goals we have supported through our entire 48-year marriage -- than anywhere else.”
