LAFFERTY Edward L. of Plymouth, formerly of Waban and Falmouth, age 84, passed away peacefully on November 20th 2017 at Benchmark Senior Living at Plymouth Crossing in Plymouth.
Beloved husband of Margot (Footer) Lafferty. Devoted father of sons Jeffrey P. Lafferty and his Wife Celia from Boca Raton, Florida and the late Edward C, and Michael J. Lafferty and his wife Alcira of Landisville, Pennsylvania. Edward was a loving Grandfather to four grandchildren, Rebecca, Emily, Julia and Patrick.
He was born November 15th, 1933 in Brooklyn NY to Edward and Edith (McGowan) Lafferty. Edward attended Regis High School in New York City, and Iona College in New Rochelle, NY and was granted a bachelor’s degree in Physics.
Edward started his career after college at Lincoln Laboratories, and later MITRE corporation in Bedford MA. During his 42-year career Edward had a remarkable ability to identify new, or emerging technologies that would become significant. This showed up very early in his career when foreseeing the advantages using higher order languages would provide, he successfully adopted FORTAN to implement data processing for the SAGE system, even though that language has been designed for numerical computation, not data processing. Later on, he was an early supporter of many technologies including Artificial Intelligence; Data Base Systems, Computer Security and Parallel Processing among others. He had authored and co-authored several books on these topics.
He had the ability to remain technically relevant even after becoming a manager of an increasing number of employees. Perhaps the most impressive example of this is that when a Department Head, he still manage to implement a partial differential equations package in to Macsyma, a mathematical calculation and graphing application which evolved from the Mathlab project at MIT. This required the knowledge of math and the LISP programming language used by the Artificial Intelligence Community plus a great amount of effort. Nevertheless, Edward was able to accomplish this without impacting his “day job”.
Edward had the ability to combine different groups of people with different cultures to get them to work together to solve problems. One of the outstanding examples of this was successfully combining Computer Scientists and Intelligence Analysts in the same department, but there are other examples as well, since the Artificial Intelligence community had a rather different culture than some of the more mundane branches of Computer Science.
Finally, during his last role with the company as Technical Director, Edward was granted the distinction of Fellow and Chief Engineer of the corporation prior to his retirement in March of 2001.
His many hobbies included antique furniture replication and woodworking, performing classical piano. Home restoration, painting, bridge, coaching little league.
Funeral from the George F. Doherty & Sons Funeral Home 477 Washington St. Wellesley on Saturday, Nov. 25th at 9:30am. Followed by a Funeral Mass in Mary Immaculate of Lourdes Church, Newton Upper Falls at 10:30am. Relatives and friends kindly invited. Visiting hours on Friday, Nov. 24th from 4-7pm in the funeral home. Interment Newton Cemetery.
In Lieu of flowers, Donations can be made to The Alzheimer’s Foundation Of America 309 Waverley Oaks Rd, Waltham, MA 02452