Roy A. Keir ’52 passed away Oct. 14, 2020, from Alzheimer’s disease. After earning his bachelor’s degree at Caltech while a resident of Fleming House, he began working in aviation electronics but soon switched to digital computing, becoming an early pioneer in designing logic circuits and leading the logic design team for the Bendix G20. After joining the University of Utah’s newly opened computer science department to teach logic design, he became that rarest of breeds, a tenured associate professor. He continued his pioneering work in practical circuitry for integer arithmetic, publishing papers on fixed- and floating-point math. His focus on rounding error, representation, and drift error significantly advanced the effort to apply theoretical math to the then-ambitious goal of getting accurate results from digital computers. His contributions to computer graphics are best remembered through his work at Evans and Sutherland, where he developed an algorithm to render fog realistically enough for pilots to train effectively on simulators. He is survived by his wife Marilyn, daughter Anne Keir Christensen (Thor), sons wurzel Parsons-Keir EE ’94 (Susan) and Michael Keir (Megan), and five amazing grandchildren.
