“Happy Birthday, Harry!” says UND
Harry Nyquist, famous inventor and UND alumnus, has his 136th birthday celebrated by the College of Engineering & Mines
Editor’s Note: This article was published for National Inventor’s Day on February 11, 2025, just a few days after Harry Nyquist’s birthday.
You’re never too old to have your birthday celebrated with cake, ice cream, and balloons—even when it’s your 136th.
Last Friday, UND students, faculty and staff flooded the first floor of Upson II to celebrate the birthday of the man with a memorial built into the wall: Harry Nyquist. A Swedish-American physicist and electrical engineer, this famous UND alumnus made critical contributions to communication theory—something students in engineering and science learn about in classes today.
From a village in Sweden, to Grand Forks, to modern textbooks
While Harry was born in a village named Nilsby in Sweden, he immigrated to the United States in 1907 with his family. Regarded as an incredible student at the University of North Dakota, he graduated with both a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering.
From 1917-1954, he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories (known as AT&T’s Department of Development & Research pre-1934), where he wrote an astounding volume of patents. A collection of his nearly 150 patents is on display at his memorial in Upson II, along with textbooks filled with his handwritten notes. His contributions didn’t go unnoticed during his time, as he received the IEEE Medal of Honor, Stuart Ballantine Medal, and Rufus Oldenburg Medal.
Why might the name ‘Nyquist’ sound so familiar to electrical engineering students today? Likely because the name is in their textbooks: the Nyquist frequency, Nyquist rate, Nyquist stability criterion, Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, Nyquist plot… the list goes on.
Do leaders flock together? Yes!
Ever heard of the English proverb ‘birds of a feather flock together’? It’s true, and even Bell Laboratories’ patent lawyers agree.
When investigating why some employees were so much more productive than others in terms of patents, they found something unexpected: the only thing the productive employees had in common with one another was that they “often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist.” It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Instead, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.”
“As you walk past his memorial, you’re inspired and reminded of the that greatness comes from UND,” said Ryan Adams, Interim Dean of the College of Engineering & Mines, at the celebration. “Harry Nyquist is one of many of the great alumni we have.”
He’s right. Recall that old saying about birds flocking together?
One of Harry’s best friends was John Bertrand Johnson, a fellow UND alumnus who also immigrated from Sweden. While he quit grade school and worked on a farm until he was 17, a family member paid him to go to the United States, sending him to high school in Velva, ND, to learn English and further his education. After graduating high school in his 20s, Bert went to UND, received his B.S. and M.S. in EE, and attended Yale simultaneously with Harry.
Together, they did important work on thermal noise, television, and other critical communication problems. During his career, Bert, and likely Harry, worked with Thomas Edison and Alan Turing, and he even knew Einstein. Their most notable collab? The Johnson-Nyquist Noise, a phenomena theorized but considered untestable by Einstein himself.
Now that’s a UND feat that’s twice as nice.
Written by Paige Prekker // UND College of Engineering & Mines
