The author of Vector Theory of Circuits Involving Synchronous Machines, Ivan H. Summers, was a 1920 graduate of the University of Southern California (electrical engineering). His education continued at the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, where he completed an advanced course in engineering and published a thesis for USC called Eddy Currents in Armature Windings. Summers wrote and published several other articles pertaining to armature conductors and system stability before his untimely death in 1932 when his glider crashed to the ground in Schenectady, New York. Summers was thirty years old.

This small collection is comprised of Ivan Summers's 1914 yearbook from Los Angeles Polytechnic High School, the thesis he wrote in 1930 after completing the advanced course in engineering through the General Electric Company, newspaper clippings regarding his fatal glider accident, letters of condolence to his wife, Minta, in the summer of 1930, and a few photographs of Summers as a child and young man.