It is a clear, cool morning in August 1999 as professors, students, and others begin to gather in the electrical engineering building at the sprawling campus of the University of São Paulo, in southeast Brazil. They are there for a special tribute: the newly expanded library will be named in honor of the faculty’s most revered professor, IEEE Fellow Luiz de Queiroz Orsini, a living legend among Brazilian electrical engineers. But just as the ceremony is about to begin—wait. Has anyone seen professor Orsini?

Distressed faculty members hurry to find him. He’s not in his office. The cafeteria? Nope. Someone finally remembers Orsini usually teaches a Signals and Systems course at that time, and to everyone’s relief, that’s where he is, calmly scribbling on the blackboard. The group begs the honoree to join his own celebration. Orsini concedes, but only after apologizing to his students for having to abandon the class.

Such is Orsini’s commitment to teaching—a lifelong commitment that, this month, reaches another milestone: it's been 60 years since the 84-year-old educator began teaching at the University of São Paulo, Brazil’s foremost educational institution, where he’s now an emeritus professor. During these six decades, Orsini created new courses and laboratories, prepared original teaching material in Portuguese, and fostered the use of computers as a teaching tool.

“He played a key role in modernizing electrical engineering education in Brazil,” says Antônio Hélio Guerra Vieira, a fellow professor and computer pioneer in Brazil. “He worked tirelessly to keep the curriculum solid in fundamentals, as well as in emerging, more advanced topics.”

Orsini estimates that he has trained more than 4000 students. His disciples went on to lead some of Brazil’s major technology projects, including the development of computer systems, advanced communications networks, and the electric power infrastructure. Other students became educators themselves, training countless more engineers.

“He inspired several generations,” says Edson Fregni, another fellow professor and a technology consultant with Forrester Research. “His greatest virtue is his dedication to each and every class, over and over.”

Among his Brazilian peers, the professor was nicknamed the “Mega Master.”

A TEACHERS' TEACHER I dropped in on professor Orsini one morning last October at his office on the second floor of the electrical engineering building. At first glance, the place looks like one of the building’s electronic shops. Atop a workbench sits a multimeter, soldering iron, tools, dc sources, and boxes of components. But as you look around, you see that an assortment of diplomas and awards and photos of Orsini’s wife, daughters, and grandchildren liven up the room.

Orsini is just the same as I remember him from my days as a student here in the mid-1990s. He enjoys a good tale, of which he has plenty.

“The other day an old man—and he seemed quite old—approached me on the street and said he was my student 40 years ago,” Orsini says with a chuckle. “I had students who told me they were the grandchildren of students of mine!”

But when I ask him about his contributions to engineering education, his answer is: “I didn’t do anything. I wrote some books and taught some classes. That’s it. Period.”

Many of his disciples, of course, are happy to disagree. For them, Orsini—a thoughtful mentor who invited students to lunch at his home, a perfectionist who prepared tough exams and explored topics always in great depth—did much more than that.

“He taught me how to be a teacher,” says fellow professor Denise Consonni, a former student. “He’s been giving these courses for so many years, but he always has something new—a new example, simulation, something.”

The classroom is one of Orsini’s greatest passions. And as the library tribute back in 1999 showed, few things can deter him when he’s at it, clad in a spotless white coat, unraveling the phasor form of Ohm's Law or perhaps the convolution operator. The story goes that once, halfway through a class, Orsini grabbed his cellphone and called up a secretary: he needed more chalk. Another time, a spider crawled onto the overhead projector, a giant arachnid-shaped shadow zigzagging on the screen; Orsini proceeded undisturbed. The professor didn’t cancel classes even when he broke his leg, maneuvering to the classroom on crutches.

I ask Orsini whether it is hard to stay current with fast-evolving technology. “Boy, there isn’t much left from what I learned in my undergraduate days,” he says. Yet the professor, who lived through such technology milestones as the invention of the transistor, the integrated circuit, the computer, and the Internet, says transitions were smooth.

APOSTLE OF ENGINEERING Born in Rio de Janeiro, Orsini moved to São Paulo and entered the mechanical-electrical engineering class of 1942 at the Polytechnic School, now part of the University of São Paulo. He graduated in 1947 and became an assistant professor at the school.

Orsini never planned to become a professor, he says. It just happened. He would remain at his alma mater to this day, only leaving temporarily to get a Ph.D. at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and to do some research work in the United States.

Orsini says that up until the mid-1950s, the University of São Paulo’s electrical engineering course consisted mostly of civil engineering topics peppered with some notions of mechanics and electricity. That scenario changed as Brazil recognized the importance of technological know-how and innovation for economic development. With well-trained electrical engineers in high demand, Orsini and his colleagues watched as their department expanded rapidly. At the same time, as technologies advanced, the curriculum evolved as well, shifting from its emphasis on power engineering and electrical machines toward such fields as electronics, telecommunications, and later, digital systems.

Orsini contributed to the changes by establishing hands-on laboratories that complemented the theoretical workload and by teaching circuit analysis, electromagnetism, and other topics in combination with advanced math concepts. Among those concepts were Laplace transforms and Fourier analysis, which would become essential tools for the new generations of electrical engineers. High on the professor’s published writings is a textbook on electric circuits that became hugely popular in Brazil and is used to this day.

“He remains an apostle of the importance of engineering fundamentals,” says José Sidnei Colombo Martini, CEO of Transmissão Paulista, one of Brazil’s largest power transmission companies. “Courses that other schools would assign a junior professor to teach, professor Orsini insisted on teaching himself.”

If Orsini’s legacy, as he insists, consists of “some books” and “some classes,” those books and classes went a long way. They helped shape electrical engineering in Brazil for six decades and, through Orsini’s disciples, for years to come.

That’s not to say the Mega Master has plans to stop anytime soon. Every month he still delves into the latest issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE, “despite the zoo of acronyms.” To keep fit, he’s got a personal trainer who helps him exercise at home. And, of course, he hasn’t given up his teaching assignments, despite being officially retired since 1992.

“As long as students say they are not tired of that old man, I’ll continue,” he says. “I need to have some fun, right?