Mason's Invariant

In electronics, Mason's invariant, named after Samuel Jefferson Mason, is a measure of the quality of transistors.

"When trying to solve a seemingly difficult problem, Sam said to concentrate on the easier ones first; the rest, including the hardest ones, will follow," recalled Andrew Viterbi, co-founder and former vice-president of Qualcomm. He had been a thesis advisee under Samuel Mason at MIT, and this was one lesson he especially remembered from his professor. A few years earlier, Mason had heeded his own advice when he defined a unilateral power gain for a linear two-port device, or U. After concentrating on easier problems with power gain in feedback amplifiers, a figure of merit for all three-terminal devices followed that is still used today as Mason's Invariant.