Robert Wendell Lucky (January 9, 1936 – March 10, 2022) was an electrical engineer, inventor, and research manager at Bell Labs and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). He is best known for his writings and speeches about technology, society, and engineering culture. Bob is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a member of TTI/Vanguard's advisory board. Early life Robert Lucky was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and went to high school in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania. He studied electrical engineering at Purdue University, graduating with a BSEE in 1957. He stayed on at Purdue and was granted an MSEE in 1959. Continuing at Purdue he did his PhD research under John C Hancock, writing a thesis on simultaneous amplitude modulated and phase modulated digital communication. In his thesis he derived two-dimensional signal constellations that are similar to those used in the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) systems commonly used in high speed digital communications today. He received his PhD from Purdue in 1961. Career Lucky joined Bell Labs in 1961, where his initial assignment was in the data theory department under William R Bennett. In 1964 he made his best known invention, the adaptive equalizer, and in the years to follow he was promoted numerous times, becoming in 1982 the executive director of the communications sciences research division. This division comprised essentially all of the Bell Labs research on wireless, optical systems, and other communications systems topics, as well as some of the Bell Labs research on physics and computer science. Two Nobel Prizes were won by researchers in the division. Lucky left Bell Labs in 1992 and joined Bellcore, the research laboratory for the divested Bell telephone companies, where he was corporate vice president, responsible for management of research. A few years later Bellcore was sold to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and renamed Telcordia Technologies (today iconectiv). Robert Lucky retired from Telcordia in 2002. Adaptive equalizer In the early 1960s the highest speed for modems on telephone lines was 2400 bits per second. Higher speeds were not possible because of intersymbol interference. Each dialed connection would have a different distorting effect on the series of pulses sent to convey digital information, smearing successive pulses and entangling them, resulting in errors in detection. Lucky invented a way to adaptively undo the smearing effects by automatic adjustment of a variable filter, using a