If each of us was asked to nominate the Great Leaps Forward in our science, and to associate each such breakthrough with a name, all our lists would have one common entry: deconvolution, and the name of Enders A. Robinson. Today, in recognition of his immense service to geophysics, the SEG adds that name to the rolls of the Honorary Members of the Society.
     In September of 1950, as a young graduate student at MIT, Enders Robinson commenced the task which would revolutionize seismics. It must have seemed very humdrum at the time; it was the digitization, with a ruler and pencil, of eight seismic records from Texas. By the spring of 1951 there were autocorrelations and spectra. No surprises there it was deconvolution which was the great unknown...Would it work on real data? It took the whole summer of 1951 to deconvolve 32 traces. The first trace (plotted, of course, by hand) looked too good to be true. But then the second, and the third...
     This success led to the establishment of the Geophysical Analysis Group at MIT; Enders Robinson was its first Director. The work of this group (1952-1957) had three profound effects on geophysics:
       First and foremost, of course, it developed the technology of deconvolution. Although scores of researchers have since written hundreds of papers on the subject of deconvolution, almost all of the basic techniques used today remain those set out by Enders Robinson in his classic papers of the 1950's.
       It forced the digital revolution. For corrections and stacking and filtering perhaps even for velocity analysis and dereverberation the industry could have continued to make progress by analog means; for statistical deconvolution the digital route was virtually the only choice.
       It created a totally new respect for theory. Seismic prospecting, to that time, had been very much a practical endeavor; doodlebuggers had scant regard for mathematicians. But deconvolution worked, and deconvolution came from theory; now there was no doubt that we must listen when theory spoke.
     How fortunate we were, then, that theory spoke in the person of Enders Robinson! For Enders could communicate. True, many of us would grimace a little when Enders would say in the preamble that we would need only elementary algebra, for we knew that what was elementary algebra to Enders was the threshold of pain for the rest of us. But it was always worth the effort; each knotty development would be followed by a clear verbal summary, and at the end we would understand. Thus was a whole generation of geophysicists reoriented by the writings of Enders Robinson (joined, from time to time, by a happy choice of coauthors).
     Enders output has been phenomenal. In more than 60 papers and essays, and in more than 20 books, he has guided and chronicled the evolution of signal processing from the hand digitization of the 1950's to the custom deconvolution chip of the 1980's, while also stimulating the adoption of these techniques in radar, speech analysis, economics and many other sciences. Thus has Enders provided for us the all-important bridge between mathematics and applied physics  without which the theory is an abstraction and the practice is unfulfilled. And to all of this Enders brought an eminently readable style and an infectious delight in the beauty of science.
     Of course, Enders would be the first to remind us that he stands on the shoulders of the giants of the past. Nevertheless, to a whole generation of geophysicists and almost despite his major contributions to other aspects of signal processing he will always remain the Father of Deconvolution.

     David W. Strangway