Our speaker was our own member, Dr. Dale Mugler.  Dale was born in Colorado and attended the University of Colorado at Boulder. Initially, he planned to major in music.He played the French Horn in the marching band and was the Drum Major. As Colorado had a good football team, he marched at the Bowl games. His band leader suggested to Dale that if he had another occupation of interest, he should pursue that line of education. His other love was math - and the rest was history as they say. 

Dale did his graduate work at Northwestern University where he earned a PhD in 1974 with a thesis of Complex Function Theory. He developed an interest in Spectral Analysis, He told us that in 1969 he contracted Achalsia, an autoimmune disease which destroys the esophagus and impacts swallowing function. The disease affects 1 in 100,000 individuals. He underwent surgery 1970, 2007, and 2009. His last surgery was an esophagectomy, the removal of the esophagus and the attachment of the stomach to the the throat. To compensate, he eats many small meals throughout the day.

Leaving NU, he spent 14 years at Santa Clara University teaching math. While there he spent 5 summers at NASA AMES doing research in Life Sciences. In particular, he he studied the affect of gravity on space travel (i.e. space motion - nausea). He spent a sabbatical year in 1983-84 at the Technical University of Aachen, Germany where he did mathematical research. He moved to the University of Akron in 1983 where he taught Biomedical Engineering until 2015. He was eean of the Honors College from 2000-2015 and started two acapella groups which are still functioning today.

These days Dale is involved in: Analog Computing, 5G Radio Spectrum,  Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Alzheimer's Disease.  He is the CTO for a startup, OCIUS (Latin for 'faster"), working to develop an analog chip that will overcome the limitations of transistor size impacting current digital computer speeds. He is funded by the Defense Department. The net impact is the ability to simulate real world events (think nuclear testing), without doing experiments. Current computer speeds do not facilitate the model complexity needed.

During the winter months Dale is in Charleston, South Carolina where he is involved at the University's medical school working on MRSpectroscopy, which is more accurate than an MRI. It produces the chemical content of an image allowing for the tracking of tumor growth within an organ and for tracking the progress of Alzheimer's Disease. The mathematics involve the application of the Fourier Transforms to wave measurements.

Finally, he is involved in the development of 5G technology which is based on millimeter waves. These waves are combined in transmission and are "unpacked" for delivery using Fourier Transform (FFT) mathematics. Dale believes he has a new way of computing the FFT. 5G technology is the new cell phone speed going from 1GB/sec to 10GB/sec. This facilitates the immediate download of movies and the connection of multiple devices to the internet.

Thank you Len Tenner for his notes!