Obituary of Jan Engel (1924-2011)

Jan M. Engel died on July 9th 2008 at his home in San Jose surrounded by his family following a stroke at the age of 84. He was born in 1924 in what was then the Free State of Danzig, which today is Gdansk, Poland. At the outbreak of World War II, he was attending school in England and unable to return home. During the war years, he was an air raid warden, diamond cutter, Polish translator, and later worked on a secret radar project for the British government. He immigrated to the United States after the war, received his M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania and became a US citizen in 1951. He worked for General Electric and Pacific Semi- Conductors before joining IBM in 1958 where he spent the rest of his career in research physics. Later he was instrumental in developing the APL computer language.

One of his main passions and achievements in life was researching the ‘kinology’ of the Engel Family, inventing his own program to show complicated family relationships and finding hundreds of new relatives. He authored many papers on physics, APL and Jewish genealogy, registered several patents and published the exhaustive genealogical work ‘The Engel Family.’ His wife, Janet Greenky, and brother, Marcel Engel predeceased him by many years. Mr. Engel will be deeply missed by his daughter, Karen Engel, living in Graz, Austria, his son Stephen Engel, of Sacramento, his granddaughters Janina and Milena, his sister Ilona Engel and brother-in-law Randall Travis of Waterbury, Vermont, and his longtime friend and companion, Sharon Grandfield, of Des Plaines, Illinois, as well as many relatives and friends.