Mors Illustris

A titan of CSP, the figure looming over every word of this Blog, the driving force behind so many valuable mathematical tools, Professor William A. Gardner, has died. Bill Gardner passed away on July 24, about two years after his beloved wife Nancy. In this post, I will chronicle some of my memories of Bill, with various nostalgic images and quotes, some of my interactions with Bill, and above all I will explain his influence on me, my career, and on the CSP Blog. I believe there would be no CSP Blog without Bill Gardner. For those readers not familiar with Gardner, he was my Master’s and Doctoral advisor from 1987 to 1992. He is the creator and expositor of modern cyclostationary-signal theory and cyclostationary signal processing. That is why, here on the CSP Blog, the reference The Literature [R1] has always been, and will always be, his seminal book on cyclic spectral analysis called Statistical Signal Processing: A Nonprobabilistic Theory. I believe he came to regret, a bit, the…