Engineering prof was world traveler, family man
Tsung Wei Sze was a leader in the Chinese underground resistance during the Japanese occupation of his native country, a translator for the U.S. Air Force during World War II, a longtime member of the engineering faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and a photographer, opera buff and woodworker.
Plus, he could play a mean harmonica.
But it was the annual, six-week-long family car camping vacations that defined him and, according to his son, David Sze of Collier, brought together his two biggest passions: family and travel.
“We traveled a lot, and it was great. Six weeks every summer for 15 or 20 years and visited every state in the union,” Mr. Sze’s son said. “All five of us slept in the station wagon on that first trip, Pittsburgh to Seattle, for the World’s Fair. After that, he got one of those pop-up trailers that becomes a tent and it was much better.”
Mr. Sze, who friends knew as “Wayne,” and who had a life as full as it was long, died Friday at Friendship Village of South Hills in Upper St. Clair, where he and his wife, Frances, have lived for 13 years. He was 95.
A naturalized U.S. citizen since 1962, the elder Mr. Sze was born in Shanghai and attended National Jiao Tong University, where he studied engineering and became a leader of the antiJapanese resistance and principal of a college preparatory night school that smuggled more than 300 technology students out of Japanese-occupied territory along China’s east coast.
A month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Sze joined the Chinese National Army, where he volunteered as an English interpreter with the U.S. 14th Air Force in Kunming, seeing action on the Burma Road, according to a biography compiled by his family. He became chief interpreting officer at the Infantry Weapons School and led a group of Chinese interpreters to the U.S., where he was discharged with the rankof lieutenant colonel.
At the end of the war, he remained in the U.S. and enrolled in the University of Missouri, where he received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1948. He earned a master’s degree from Purdue University in 1950 and a doctorate in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1954.
While at Northwestern, he met Frances Tung, a graduate student in biological sciences who owned a typewriter and agreed to let Mr. Sze use it if he would type her Ph.D. thesis. They were married in 1952.
The couple moved to Pittsburgh in 1954, and Mr. Sze joined the faculty in Pitt’s Department of Electrical Engineering, where he went on to hold the Fessenden Professor and Westinghouse Professor endowed chairs and served as associate dean of engineering and acting dean of engineering in 1973-74.
At Pitt, he introduced the study of computers, teaching courses and writing the textbooks for early classes on computer systems and programming languages. He also established the Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Laboratory in 1976, serving as its director until his retirement in 1993. And he initiated electrical engineering exchange programs between Pitt and Jiao Tong University campuses in China and Taiwan.
The exchange program allowed him to travel to China with his family.
“Every summer, we went somewhere and we estimated we went to about 50 countries, with frequent trips to Maine and the maritime provinces of Canada because my father was addicted to lobster,” said Daniel Sze of Menlo Park, Calif., another of Mr. Sze’s sons.“Dad would know just which exit to take and drive right to a pier to buy the lobsters from the fishermen.”
In addition to his wife and sons, Mr. Sze is survived by a daughter, Deborah Sze Modelewski of New Hope, Pa., eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
There is no visitation. Burial will be private in Mt. Lebanon Cemetery. A memorial service is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at Friendship Village. Condolences may be sent to his widow frances.t.sze@gmail.com.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Tsung Wei Sze Fund at The Lifespace Foundation at Friendship Village, 1290 Boyce Road, Upper St. Clair, PA 15241, where they will be used to construct a new gazebo for residents.