Giants of Electrical Engineering
He championed alternating current (AC) power and famously feuded with Thomas Edison during the "War of the Currents."
Who is Nikola Tesla?
This Rice ECE professor invented gold nanoshells in the mid-1990s — tiny particles that can target and destroy cancer cells using light. She recently won the 2025 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry.
Who is Dr. Naomi Halas?
It’s the mythical substance said to be sealed inside every electronic component, which causes the component to die if it escapes.
What is the "magic smoke"?
LED
What is a Light Emitting Diode?
In Back to the Future, Doc Brown's Flux Capacitor required exactly this much power to time travel.
What is 1.21 Gigawatts?
Co-founder of Intel, the law named after him famously predicted that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every two years.
Who is Gordon Moore?
Dr. Don Johnson is Professor Emeritus in the ECE department and also holds emeritus status in what other Rice department?
The common name for a solderless prototyping base comes from an era when engineers literally used wooden boards meant for slicing loaves in the kitchen.
What is a breadboard?
USB
What is a Universal Serial Bus?
In the movie Iron Man, Tony Stark builds a miniaturized version of this fictional power source in a cave (with a box of scraps!).
What is the Arc Reactor?
During WWII, this Hollywood actress co-developed a frequency-hopping spread spectrum system that paved the way for modern Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Who is Hedy Lamarr?
A pioneer in compressive sensing, he co-developed the single-pixel camera and founded the massive, wildly popular open-source textbook initiative known as OpenStax.
Who is Dr. Richard Baraniuk?
This colloquial term refers to a bulky, boxy AC adapter that takes up more than its fair share of space on a power strip.
What is a wall wart?
PCB
What is a Printed Circuit Board?
The term for a computer glitch supposedly originated in 1947 when computer pioneer Grace Hopper found one of these literal insects trapped inside a Harvard Mark II relay.
What is a moth (or a bug)?
Known as the "father of information theory," he published a landmark 1948 paper while working at Bell Labs.
Who is Claude Shannon?
Known as "Sid" to almost everyone, this pioneer in digital signal processing and former Dean of Engineering not only helped develop a unified theory of FFTs, but won the George R. Brown Teaching Award six times.
Who is C. Sidney Burrus?
Often caused by a shaky hand or using too much flux, it’s an unintended connection made by molten metal that shorts two adjacent pads or pins.
What is a solder bridge?
MOSFET
What is Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor?
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, this sentient AI computer politely but terrifyingly refuses a command by stating, "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
What is HAL 9000?
This Scottish physicist formulated the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, uniting electricity, magnetism, and light into one set of equations.
Who is James Clerk Maxwell?
After a legendary 39-year career at Texas Instruments where he became known as a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) visionary, he brought his expertise to the Rice ECE faculty as a Professor in the Practice.
Who is Gene Frantz?
This messy prototyping technique—where an integrated circuit is flipped upside-down with its pins pointing up and soldered directly in the air—shares its name with an insect that has met its demise.
What is "dead bug" style?
IEEE
What is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers?
During a tense scene in Jurassic Park, a young Lex Murphy manages to lock the doors and reboot the security grid by declaring "I know this!" when she recognizes this classic, real-world operating system.
What is UNIX?