Ken Phillips (4) (–2000)

[excerpted from MIT Media Lab online memorial, by Richard Solomon]
Dr. Kenneth L. Phillips was a vice-president of Citicorp for many years, where he spearheaded their entry into global telecom-based banking and finance. Ken was a true polymath. Telecom was not his only expertise. Ken taught music theory at Tanglewood among other places, and was an accomplished pianist, self-taught aided by his exquisite innate ability of perfect pitch. Ken taught courses on the psychology of creativity and on telecom engineering. He authored numerous papers on psychology, cryptology, mathematics, engineering, and public policy. He testified many times before Congress and state public utility commissions.

He earned his Ph. D. from City University in New York in Psychology. He loved to tell how he paid his way through college by working as a radio announcer in New York and Boston; among the roles he would recreate was that of the "Voice of Jello."

Ken was an expert on the I Ching, writing a landmark paper on the parallels between it and the structure of DNA. He practiced as a Jungian analyst for many years, but Ken's main love in life was his koalas in Australia. He devoted a month every year to attending to these threatened animals, performing eye operations, documenting their behavior in photographs and video, and writing a marvelous book on their habits and habitats which he illustrated himself (Koalas: Australia's Ancient Ones, Macmillan, 1994).