Milo Backus has won the highest honor given by SEG (the Maurice Ewing Medal in 1990) and by EAGE (the Conrad Schlumberger Award in 1975); he was made an Honorary Member of SEG in 1988; he has been elected to the SEG Executive Committee on two occasions; and he was a major factor in the Distinguished Achievement Awards that SEG bestowed on GSI in 1986 and 1989.
     This abbreviated list of honors endorses the point made in his citation (see TLE, February 1991) for the Ewing MedalSthat here is an individual of great vision, possibly one of the greatest in the history of our profession.
     Milo was one of that fabulous group of MIT graduates who entered the field of applied geophysics in the 1950s and played such a huge role in the digital revolution in our field. Milo's contribution ranks with any. He was the mastermind in the creation and application of many digital signal processing techniques, and he personally conceived or contributed to the development of many of the first processing algorithms. A decade later, he thought through and led the development and promotion of the practical application of 3-D methods to exploration and production, the contribution for which he is being honored today.
     These two contributions, in and of themselves, would indisputably elevate Milo into the ranks of the giants of geophysical exploration. He was the chief architect and creator of the digital revolution, both as an individual contributor and as a manager of research.
     Milo has been a geophysicist of international stature from virtually the moment he received his doctorate from MIT in 1956. Just three years later, he received SEG's Best Paper Award for "Water Reverberations: Their nature and elimination," one of the most important articles ever published in Geophysics. The concepts developed in this paper later emerged into various forms of deconvolution in the subsequent changeover to digital technology.
     More than a quarter of a century later, Milo gave SEG's Distinguished Lecture on "The fourth dimensionSoffset dependent reflectivity." This technique has evolved in the present decade as one of the most important items in the explorationist's toolbox. In between, he did research that ranged from antisubmarine warfare to fundamental wave propagation.
     After two decades as a geophysical contractor and consultant, Milo joined the faculty at the University of Texas-Austin, where he is currently the Dave P. Carlton Centennial Professor of Geophysics. He has now taught, nurtured, and inspired several generations of undergraduate and graduate students. At Texas, as he had at GSI, Milo quickly attracted dedicated and talented people whom he stimulated to superior achievement. Much of this has been done through the consortium he initiated, Project SEER (Solid Earth Exploration Research), a fundamental research program with broad industry support which has the dual objective of fundamental research and thesis support for candidates for advanced degrees. As a result of Milo's vision and success in this endeavor, Texas is now a prime source for valuable original research in wave propagation and for well-trained graduates, many of whom have gone on to prominent positions in the geophysical community.
     Milo's contributions have been original, fundamental, and long lasting.