Remembering Professor Boris Kogan

For over two decades, we were fortunate to have Boris Kogan as an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department. His history of ground-breaking scientific work and his 1987 immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States should be an inspiration to all.  

Dr. Kogan's B.S. and M.S. degrees were from the Charkov Electrical Engineering Institute; he received his Ph.D. in automatic control from the Moscow Institute of Automation and Telemechanics, USSR Academy of Science. In the Soviet Union, Dr. Kogan's scientific interests centered on automatic control, computer design, and computer simulation. He served as a professor/lecturer with the Moscow Institute for Physics and Engineering; he created and was the first director of the Computer Simulation Laboratory; and in 1951 he was awarded the USSR State Prize for creating the first analog computer.

Here at UCLA, Dr. Kogan's research turned to the investigation of electrical wave propagation in excitable media using massively parallel digital computer systems.  His studies focused on the peculiarities of electrical wave propagation along the healthy and the diseased heart muscle, and his goal was to find, together with cardiologists, the mechanisms of heart fibrillation and the corresponding preventive means.  

Boris Kogan was 98 years old when he died this month (April 2012).  He had many colleagues and friends here in the Computer Science Department and in several of UCLA's medical departments.  We shall miss him.