DESURVIRE, Emmanuel 1955–

PERSONAL: Born June 7, 1955, in Boulogne, France; son of Raymond (an aircraft engineer) and Marcelle (a psychologist) Desurvire; married Cynthia Wolsfeld (an artist), November, 1995; children: Pierre-Nikolas. Education: University of Paris, M.S. (theoretical physics), 1981; University of Nice, Ph.D., 1983, Sc.D., 1998.

ADDRESSES: Office—Alcatel Centre de Marcoussis, 91460 Marcoussis, France. E-mail—emmanuel.desurvire@alcatel.fr.

CAREER: Thomson-CSF, France, staff member, 1980–3; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, postdoctoral affiliate, 1984–86; AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, member of technical staff, 1986–90; Columbia University, New York, NY, associate professor, 1990–93; Alcatel Research, France, group leader, then joint department leader, 1996–99, predevelopment project manager at Alcatel Submarine Networks, La Villedu Bois, France, 1999–2000, director of Alcatel Technical Academy, Marcoussis, France, 2000–04. Founder and editor-in-chief, Optical Fiber Technology (magazine), 1991–2000. Holder of nearly three dozen patents.

MEMBER: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS: Distinguished Lecturer Award, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1992; International Prize in Optics, 1994; Benjamin Franklin Medal in Engineering, 1998.

WRITINGS:

Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers: Principles and Applications, Wiley Publishing Group (New York, NY), 1994, revised, with others, as Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers: Device and System Developments, 2002.

Wiley Survival Guides in Global Telecommunications: Signaling Principles, Network Protocols, and Wireless Systems, Wiley Publishing Group (New York, NY), 2004.

Wiley Survival Guides in Global Telecommunications: Broadband Access, Optical Components and Networks, and Cryptography, Wiley Publishing Group (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to books; contributor to more than 200 technical publications, including Scientific American, Optics & Photonic News, La Recherche, and Physics Today.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Research on ultimate transmission-capacity limits in lightwave telecommunications systems, broadband access technologies, and classical and quantum information theories.

SIDELIGHTS: Emmanuel Desurvire told CA: "I began writing, like any scientific/engineer contributor, with involvement in book chapters. The idea of making a single-author reference book did not start until I joined academia, because my field of expertise (erbium-doped fiber amplifiers) was brand new and unpublished in any previous reference book. My motivation was driven by a concern to reconcile first-principles with engineering, and I offered to the next generation a unified and high-level account of knowledge, based upon more than 600 new technical communications in the field, on one hand, and forty years of laser history on the other. All these references were only available on paper/book support and handwritten notes at the time.

"The motivation for my second book was to update the first reference with anything fundamental that could have been missed, along with all developments that came up during the ensuing ten years. There was no attempt to improve what is now known as 'The EDFA Bible,' but I wanted to give it an inspirational/vocational continuation with fresh revelations and thoughts. This time the writing was accomplished along with three coauthors and colleagues, internationally reputed for their own contributions to optically-amplified communication systems. We all took great pride in the team work and professional concern for carving out an objective, 'absolute' reference meant to survive troubled market times (the Internet bubble) and inspire the generation of researchers coming immediately next.

"The motivation for the third and fourth book was the phrase, 'If you want to know a field, teach it; if you want to master it, write a book.' I had always wanted to know about the rest of telecommunications; that is, the body of knowledge outside my immediate technical expertise. The intention was to establish new conceptual links (for reference purposes) between the optics and the 'coms communities', who have historical distances because of their seemingly irreconcilable, unmistakable backgrounds.

"My first book had no competition or predecessors, a unique opportunity in science and engineering! The second book offered a professional way to show that four experts can write a book without bias, in a style carefully managed, with references as complete as humanly possible—a lasting reference with added value. The third and fourth books represented a personal attempt to revisit telecom as a unified discipline, rather than a stack of disconnected layers of knowledge (as is generally known).

"Personally, I like to teach, and I like to write, the latter being a pretext and means for the former. My company recognized a need for my expanding perspectives, and further, I had no problem writing on weekend time, bringing home loads of library books, and buying my own ones when needed. Being able to move to a different field each month with lots of different books coming up every week was extremely helpful, but a bit exhausting. The Internet allowed me to solve issues which turned out not to be so 'real' (as it often happens in this case) and to discover new subject items as well. There were lots of white papers (to read diagonally), slideware (to read as if one tries to sell you something, whether existing or not), and other press articles (to read as if written by the most biased or scientifically literate professional). The Internet provided a means for a sanity check, but overall Internet information must be taken with extreme caution, for these kinds of reasons.

"My writing process includes waking up early in the morning with fresh coffee and fuzzy, not-awake thoughts. These couple of hours of writing before work are useful, if not salutary. Your mind is at its best, creative and alert, close to conception. Such an opportunity won't come at the end of the day. There is no need for an alarm clock, because you already dream of the subject and open issues you are going to address as you wake up. The dragon of the day will be defeated, no matter how scary.

"When writing, I never forget that I am 'speaking' to a real person. Readers will like it as long as the creation makes sense. Like in music, embellishments should be sparse. Seamless first-principle derivations and inventories of technical literature (with its endless queue of references and footnotes) can make a good scientific book, but one must be careful not to become utterly boring. The idea of writing is to engage the reader's interest. If thoughts like 'ha-ha!,' 'hum!,' or 'how interesting!' are absent in the author's mind, they are unlikely to appear in the reader's mind.

"I do not write biographies, essays, histories, or fiction. My endeavor is defined by expectations from technical communities. With the third book, however, I departed from this type of security. In hindsight, I could hardly have imagined that I could describe (for instance) the principle of simultaneous secret sharing in cryptography within a global telecommunications book. But the fact is that this new knowledge rightly fits into the purpose of the book.

"Why do I write about telecommunications? The subject is central to the twenty-first century, like electricity was in the early nineteenth and computers were in the second half of the twentieth. Books (meaning intense reading) make people think, and I am inspired to be the first one to jump into some cold mountain pool of knowledge and produce circles on the water surface, no matter how cold it may initially feel."