Diogenes Angelakos, 77, Scholar Who Was Target of Unabomber

Diogenes J. Angelakos, a professor emeritus of electronic engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who was an early victim of the Unabomber, died on Saturday at his home here. He was 77.

The cause was prostate cancer, Robert Sanders, a spokesman for the university, said.

Dr. Angelakos served for four decades as a professor at the Berkeley campus, and was recognized as one of world’s foremost experts on the complex nature of the scattering of electromagnetic waves, as well as on the design of wireless antennas.

Serving as director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley from 1964 to 1985, Dr. Angelakos was also widely credited with building the small departmental research group into one of the university’s largest research laboratories, with a yearly budget of some $35 million.

Still, it was the event of the morning of July 2, 1982, that brought Dr. Angelakos’s life to the attention of the nonscientific world.

While lounging in a room near his laboratory, Dr. Angelakos happened on an oddly shaped device: a silver cylinder studded with gauges and dials. He later told reporters that he believed the object to be a misplaced construction tool.

But an instant after Dr. Angelakos grabbed the contraption’s handle, a pipe bomb secreted inside the cylinder exploded, ripping through his right hand and sending shrapnel tearing into his face.

Dr. Angelakos was spared worse injury, however, when a gasoline component of the bomb failed to ignite. The bomb was later determined by Federal law-enforcement officials to have been designed by the serial bomber known as the Unabomber.

Dr. Angelakos’s life was touched by the Unabomber’s violence again three years later when a Berkeley graduate student, Capt. John E. Hauser, was badly maimed by another bomb left in his laboratory’s building. Dr. Angelakos, who was working nearby at the time, was one of the first on the scene after the explosion.

Theodore J. Kaczynski, a former professor of mathematics at Berkeley, was arrested last year in the Unabom case and is facing trial this fall in Federal District Court in Sacramento, Calif.

Dr. Angelakos, who retired in 1990, made an almost complete physical recovery from the bombing. But in an 1993 interview with The New York Times, he said he blamed injuries he received in the bombing for robbing him of precious time with his wife, Helen, who died of cancer shortly after the explosion.

He is survived by his daughter Erica, of Seattle, as well as his brother, Chris, and sister, Bessis Schohl, both of Luddington, Mich.