I am Mo Jamshidi, retired professor of the University of Texas . I had the pleasure of Eli’s friendship for the last 30 years of his life. I organized a 1-day honoring conference for him in 1991. Who was who in control systems came from all over the works to celebrate his extraordinary life. I miss his voice. I used to talk to him every 2-3 weeks.

I was so sorry to hear of Dr. Jury's passing and also of the passing of his daughter Evelyn.  We so value all that Dr. Jury did both for the engineering profession and for the University of Miami.

Uncle Eli,

What a beloved uncle, a brilliant mind, and a gentle soul you are.  You were always gracious and generous in your teaching, guiding, and wisdom sharing.  A shining star and graciously humble in your greatness.  You are loved and you will be missed by humanity.  Thank you for all your contributions to advancing technology and humanity..

God bless you.

Love, 

Susan Norton

I'm writing as the department chair at Columbia - we have heard the sad news of Prof. Jury's passing.

Prof. Jury was a giant of our field, and one of the best loved and regarded members of our department.  We give an annual student award in his honor to the most distinguished student in signal processing.

With many condolences, your family is  in our thoughts.

-John

I first met Eli at the IFAC Congress in Basel Switzerland  1963 when he gave a lecture on Stability theory. At that time I was working in Power Electronics and Electrical machines. After his lecture, I decided to work in Automatic Control. This was the beginning of my work in the area that resulted in a chair of Automatic Control at ETH in 68. After starting building the Institute of Automatic Control we did have correspondence and during my sabbatical, at IBM Research Lab in San Jose California, Eli invited me to visit him at  Berkeley and I was lucky to meet Brian Anderson there where Eli introduced Brian to me. The same day at lunch we discussed a problem and the result was our first paper together, Eli, Brian and myself. Since then I met  Eli many times in Zurich, Berkeley, and Miami where we investigated problems mainly in Stability theory and became close friends and our families became also connected. My wife Zeinab and I enjoyed the kindness and generosity of Eli and Joice.
I have many nice memories, one of them during a control conference in the US when a friend of mine who was at that time at Illinois said when he saw us together " You are like twins"
It was an honor for me to be a friend of Eli. What remains are the memories.



Eli Jury was a giant of control theory at Berkeley. He came to Berkeley at a time of explosive growth in control and systems theory joining the likes of Lotfi Zadeh, Charles Desoer, Ernest Kuh, and then growing that group to include many other luminaries and stars at Berkeley. He is really the father of the z Transform and discrete time control. I had the good fortune to be a student at Berkeley while he was still teaching and we enjoyed his meticulous and rigorous style. Particularly memorable to us was his old world charm.  He was also meticulously dressed and a thorough gentleman. 
After he retired and joined the University of Miami, he endowed the Jury Award at Berkeley which has become a much coveted student award. He also endowed a wonderful seminar series at University of Miami. which I participated in 2010. I was unable to meet him then, but was able to speak to him on the phone 
He will be much remembered for his many contributions to control theory, his collegiality and good humor, and his commitment to excellence!  

I am one of the many who have been motivated by Professor Jury through his many textbooks and publications. I have had opportunities to meet him during IEEE Conferences and workshops. For the giant he was, he was pleasant to talk with and discuss research problems and issues. I have benefited very much from his association. He was an icon in the field and a mentor to many. The research community will miss him very much. My kind words to his daughter and niece.

Kari Rajan 

My deepest sympathies to the  family of Professor Jury, in particular to his daughter Dianne and to his nice Audrey.
It was an honor and a pleasure to work on my doctoral dissertation with Professor Jury at UC Berkeley in the 1970s.  As my mentor and friend, Eli leaves me with great memories of scholastic work, cooperation and nurturing.  He was a gentle, encouraging and helpful advisor. He introduced me to the area of signal processing and we worked together in challenging two-dimensional problems under his vision and always encouraging guidance. My memories of him  will stay with me for the rest of my life.


Eli and I met often during his many years at Berkeley. Often it was with his close friends, Larry Stark and Bernard Widow.
We often had dinners at the Berkeley Marina. 
Eli was a gentle and gracious man, very dedicated to doing research, mentoring colleagues and friends, and using his resources to support education and recognize achievement.
He established prizes at Berkeley and the Technion and a Lecture Series at the University of Miami. I was honored to present one of them. I last met him a a few weeks before his 92nd birthday, and he was in good form,.
Eli pioneered the development of the z-transform, a fundamental tool for studying discrete time systems, and wrote the first and still widely used textbook on it. 
Among several other contributions was the landmark Jury stability test. He received many honors, notably the Richard Bellman Control Heritage award.
Professor Jury will be long remembered.
Thomas Kailath
Stanford University


I offer my deepest sympathies to the family,  especially Dianne and Audrey.
I first met Eli round 1964 or maybe 1965. I was then a PhD student at Stanford, and there was a joint seminar several times a year with dinner following between Berkeley and Stanford faculty and students in electrical engineering. It was at one such event that I first met one of my heros, and it was an honour and flattering to have a conversation with him. Over the years and especially after completing my PhD,  we had a number of contacts which resulted in many jointly authored papers, and visits by myself to Berkeley . Eli came to Australia where I was working for an extended visit in 1975. Then in 1983, we started further collaboration involving also Mohamed Mansour at ETH Zurich.  This continued for a number of year; we shared wonderful leisure time also during these visits. Eli was not just a hero figure to me, but actually very influential on my career, and I remain forever grateful to him. 

Jila and I have known Eli Jury since 1990, when we celebrated his illustrative career in Chicago in June 1900 right after the ACC – American Control Conference. Joyce was there, even though she was not travelling much at the time. Numerous distinguished control and systems greats like Tsypkin (From Moscow), Zadeh and Kailath from California, Brian Anderson (From Australia), Karl Astrom (Sweden), Mohammad Mansour (Switzerland), Ackerman (His MS student at UC Berkeley from Germany), to name a few. Our publishing company (TSI Press) published the proceedings that I co-edited  Brian Anderson, Mohammad Mansour and late Nirmal Bose. In one of his few trips to New Mexico, when I was a professor at the University of New Mexico, I took him to Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) to see the Museum there. He was interested in LANL, because when he was a BS student at TECHNION, he heard about the atomic bomb at LANL and he decided to let go of going to England, came to US, and enrolled at Harvard for his MS degree before joining to Columbia for his PhD. He was a solid technically accomplished control engineer and professor. He had contributed to the z-transform theory as a graduate student at Columbia, where not many people may know. His Jury’s Table for stability of digital control system is in every advanced control textbook. We had the honor of hosting him at our house in Albuquerque and were both honored to be his and Joyce’s guest for a dinner in Miami Beach. I was one of the honored friends of him that he gave me two assignments to give keynotes on Eli Jury Scholarship Celebration both at the University of Miami as well as at TECHNION. He was a rare gentle man and humane legend that we have now lost. World control community misses him now. Bless his sole.

Jila and I sincerely condole his daughter Dianna and his niece Audrey. 

Mo Mohammad and Jila Jamshidi
September 21, 2020


Fifty-eight years ago, I received a letter from Professor Jury who invited me to visit UC Berkeley as a visiting  junior faculty member under his guidance which shaped my later career development.   He was such a  kind and inspiring  professor forever in my heart with deep gratitude and persistent learning spirit.  

C. C. Li, Professor Emeritus, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 
9/21/2020

As a recipient of the Eliahu Jury Award at the University of Miami in 2002 and an educator who has a deep respect for Professor Jury's outstanding technical achievements, I wish to express my sympathy to the family of Professor Jury in their loss of a loving person.
Sincerely,
John Proakis

OBITUARY

Eliahu Ibrahim Jury

May 23, 1923 – September 20, 2020

Riverside Gordon Memorial Chapels

Show your support

Add a Memory

Share Obituary

Get Reminders

Services