Audio technology innovator Lewis Athanas spoke at the STEM² Summit about his adventures and misadventures throughout his education and how they eventually guided him to pursue a career in audio and noise-cancelling technology.
Lewis Athanas is a designer of audio equipment, primarily patenting loudspeakers.
His fascination in this field is the boundary where electricity turns into waveforms and wavefronts in the air around us.
His first successful project was an Edison Tin Foil Cylinder recorder/player, built at the age of eight in the fourth grade.
Mr. Athanas has some forty mass produced products to his credit, and a handful of patents on which several companies have been founded.
He has been Senior Engineer at Boston Acoustics and Inventor in Residence at Arthur D. Little & Co. He is a mostly self-taught engineer and musician.
Mr. Athanas claims the self-taught aspects are most evident in his musicianship, which he continues without any encouragement whatsoever from any who have heard him play.
Mrs. Condry understood something about how my mind process works. What happened was that she realized I liked to make connections. ... That's what I got from Mrs. Condry. It was really pretty neat. She gave me permission to use my brain and think.