Richard Lyon's early years on the faculty of MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering

Richard Lyon joined the faculty in 1970, but was associated with the ME Department for several years. Stephen Crandall, the Head of the Applied Mechanics Division, had instituted various graduate courses, including one taught by Lyon (BBN) and another taught by Miguel Junger (CAA). Allan Pierce joined as an Assistant Professor in 1966 and was tasked with teaching a graduate course on wave propagation. Lyon had emerged as the principal exponent of statistical energy analysis (SEA), and several MIT students did theses supervised or co-supervised by Lyon. Dick came as a professor in 1970. At the same time he founded Cambridge Collaborative with Jerry Manning, a fellow BBN employee and a former MIT student. Lyon, after joining the faculty, instituted several new research programs, loosely classified as architectural acoustics and noise control. The present talk focuses in part on Lyon's influence on Allan's career during the time they overlapped at MIT and gives some perspective on Lyon's style and leadership. Dick's work on acoustical scale-modeling and the theses he supervised during his early years on the faculty were of great interest to Allan. Dick prompted the work with Wayne Kinney on the field experiments in South Boston on the propagation of noise from low-flying helicopters into urban canyons. He also prompted Allan into attacking the problem of propagation around a three-sided barrier, and it was Dick who palmed off his job as associate editor of JASA onto Allan and thereby cemented his commitment to the ASA.