Remembering Dick Garwin, renowned engineer and advisor

Editor’s note: This essay is part of a collection of appreciations of Dick Garwin. It was originally published by IBM Research and appears here with permission. The text has been lightly edited for style and clarity.

IBM Fellow Emeritus and longtime US presidential advisor Richard “Dick” Garwin has passed away. He was 97 years old.

In his seven-decade career, Garwin helped define the future of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, laser printers, touch screens, and the hydrogen bomb. He spent his life in the pursuit of science, and was awarded time and again for his contributions. Among his many accolades, Garwin received the Presidential Medal of Science, the Vannevar Bush Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He advised every president from Eisenhower to Obama, and Enrico Fermi believed him to be “the only true genius” he had ever met.

Garwin was clearly gifted from a young age. By just 21, he had earned his PhD from the University of Chicago, and by 23, he began to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There, he designed the first working hydrogen bomb with a team of researchers, many of whom had been involved in the Manhattan Project. In a matter of weeks, Garwin took what had been theoretical concepts from the likes of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, and turned them into the world’s first working prototype.

But this was only the beginning for Garwin’s contributions to science. Around this same time, he accepted a position at IBM’s new research division that was based out of Columbia University. He moved with IBM Research to its new headquarters in Yorktown Heights, when the facility opened in 1961. Garwin had an office in the lab through to his retirement in 1993.

Garwin split his early years at IBM with continuing to serve the US government. He spent two terms on the President’s Science Advisory Committee, advised President Kennedy on nuclear tests in 1962, worked on troop sensors for use in Vietnam, advised President Carter on potential South African nuclear tests in 1979, and later worked on nuclear nonproliferation treaties. He even helped debunk the argument that there was a second shooter in the Kennedy assassination.

At IBM, Garwin worked on varied projects that resulted in technologies that continue to impact all our daily lives. His research into spin-echo magnetic resonance led to the first MRI machines. He advocated for publishing research on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm, which has become part of the backbone of digital signal processing—which all modern telecoms, internet communication, and music streaming rely on.

Garwin also carried out seminal work in superconducting computers and silicon integrated-circuit technology. He helped develop laser printers and displays, eye-tracking inputs for computers, early printers and touchscreen monitors, and GPS technology. In his 41 years with IBM, Garwin was awarded 47 patents and published over 500 research papers.

Garwin’s life and career are as storied as they are impressive, but he remained humble about his achievements. “I’m not a philosopher,” he told IBM Research in 2018. “I’m a physicist and a technician—you have ideas or you see needs and you think about them. Mostly I’ve done that.”

When Garwin was awarded the Medal of Freedom, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna (who was then director of IBM Research) echoed that same attitude about Garwin and how many feel about their life in science at IBM. “Many of us who came to IBM in the hope that our work could make a difference—that it could impact the world in some profound way—drew our inspiration from Dick,” Krishna said. “Because that is exactly what he achieved throughout his long and brilliant career.”