Philip J. Kuekes – 50th Reunion Essay

Philip J. Kuekes

Date of Death: 29-Nov-2010

College: Timothy Dwight

(This memorial appeared in the November, 2018 Class Notes.)

Your scribe has just learned of the death of Philip Kuekes, a resident of Menlo Park, California, who died of glioblastoma on Nov. 29, 2010.

His brother Tom writes: He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Fairfield, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale University in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics. He was a member of Timothy Dwight College.

Phil moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969, where for a time he owned his own computer consulting business and worked for TRW in Mountain View. He later worked for Hewlett Packard, specializing in nanotechnology.

Philip’s career designing highly parallel computers led to his groundbreaking work at HP Labs. Phil designed, and his team built, a defect-tolerant computer that worked perfectly despite 220,000 hardware defects, which opened the door to making large-scale nanotechnology practical. Phil and his team received the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology in 2000. Phil also authored over 70 patents.

He enjoyed hiking and traveling the world, and he was a devoted family man. His widow, Cynthia Kuekes passed away on July 30, 2018. They are survived by their daughter, Ofelie Kuekes.

You can see Phil in a recent and fascinating video on YouTube, where he discusses his research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUOekeiqihc. (Warning: this video contains graphic descriptions of atoms and computer memory, and may make you even more proud to be Y ’69.) A magazine article on our class website also discusses his research.