Willis C. Gore, engineering educator

Willis C. Gore, who taught for 44 years in the Johns Hopkins University’s electrical and computer engineering department, died Friday at the Mercy Ridge Retirement Community in Timonium of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 89.

Willis Carroll Gore, the son of John Gore, a Bethlehem Steel Corp. electrician, and Emma Knoch Gore, a homemaker, was born and raised in West Baltimore.

He was a graduate of Polytechnic Institute and earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1948 and his doctorate, also in engineering, in 1952, both from Johns Hopkins.

While Dr. Gore was a Johns Hopkins undergraduate, he was an instructor at the Radio Material School at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

Dr. Gore’s research spanned the era of power, electronic and control systems to the dawn of the computer age.

His interests included computer engineering, operating systems, information theory, and new classes of codes and new methods of decoding, which greatly influenced the field of cryptology.

Dr. Gore published more than 25 articles, ranging from “information theory and coding to current arc detection, ultrasonics, nonlinear systems, and even models of mutation frequency in DNA sequences,” according to a Hopkins profile. He retired in 2003. Dr. Gore also held a U.S. patent for the Gore Automatic Frequency Locking Circuit.

A licensed professional engineer, Dr. Gore also served as chairman of the Baltimore section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

He also had served as a consultant to more than 15 companies, including AAI Corp., Martin Marietta, Westinghouse Electric Corp. and Litton Industries.

The former Towson and Sparks resident, who had lived at Mercy Ridge since 2010, enjoyed photography and computers.

He was a member of the Johns Hopkins Club.

His wife of 39 years, the former Betty Christle, died in 1989.

Funeral services will be held at 4 p.m. today at the Lemmon Funeral Home, 10 W. Padonia Road, Timonium.

Dr. Gore is survived by his wife of 24 years, Sue Lohn; a son, Edward Gore of Quincy, Ill.; two daughters, Carol Dorr of Branford, Conn., and Cathy Cohn of Tucson, Ariz.; and two grandchildren.