Conny Palm

Who was Conny Palm?

Conrad "Conny" Palm was a Swedish electrical engineer and statistician, known for several contributions to teletraffic engineering and queueing theory.

Palm enrolled at the School of Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1925, being awarded his M.Sc. and Ph.D on a dissertation entitled Intensitätsschwankungen im Fernsprechverkehr. Palm's work was also joint with L. M. Ericsson, cooperating with Christian Jacobæus. He attended Harald Cramér's queueing theory group, met William Feller. Later, Palm was in the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery, where he led the project that developed the first Swedish computer, the BARK, informally referred to as CONIAC. He was adjunct professor in telecommunications at Royal Institute of Technology as well.

Professor Håkan Sterky, who was Palm's thesis advisor, has characterised Palm as a bohemian and a brilliant statistician. He had started his research before he graduated, which seemed to be due to a lack of interest for some undergraduate courses rather than the level of difficulty of the courses.