Elwyn Berlekamp

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Berlekamp in Banff 2005

Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp (born September 6, 1940 in Dover , Ohio - † April 9, 2019 ) was an American mathematician and computer scientist who dealt in particular with coding theory and combinatorial game theory.

Life

Berlekamp studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he was a Putnam Fellow in 1961 after successfully participating in the competition of the same name. In 1962 he completed his master’s degree there and in 1964 did his doctorate in electrical engineering with Robert Gray Gallager and Claude Shannon (block coding with noiseless feedback). He then taught at the University of California, Berkeley until 1966 , before joining Bell Laboratories as a scientist . From 1971 he was again professor of mathematics in Berkeley.

Berlekamp was married and had two daughters and a son. He died at the age of 78 in April 2019.

plant

Berlekamp developed algorithms for ( error-correcting ) codes, for example the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm and the Berlekamp-Welch algorithm. In 1973 he founded Cyclotomics Inc. with his wife Jennifer and Solomon W. Golomb , which developed such algorithms. In 1982 he was its CEO (which is why he reduced his teaching activities at Berkeley during this time), in 1985 the company was sold to Eastman Kodak . In 1984 the company Cylinks was founded as an offshoot for their cryptography developments, which later became part of the Safenet company.

In combinatorial game theory, he was the co-author of a standard work with John Horton Conway and Richard K. Guy (Winning Ways) and a book with David Wolfe about the mathematics of Go and a book about the Children game Dots and Boxes (Dots and Boxes), which he analyzed from the end of the 1960s.

He developed the Berlekamp algorithm (1967), which is used in computer algebra to factorize polynomials over finite fields .

After working in an advisory capacity for the company Axcom (which at that time developed algorithms for derivatives trading of the medallion fund of the mathematician James Simons ) from 1986, he took over the company in 1989 and became its president, but sold his shares to Simons after a year in December 1990 , where he significantly increased the company's profits with the development and implementation of new algorithms. The company is now part of James Simons' hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. As a result, he was on the finance committee of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. From 1994 to 1998 he was chairman of the board of directors of MSRI and from 2001 to 2003 of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI).

He was also co-founder of the mathematics publishing house AK Peters by Alice and Klaus Peters in 1991.

From 1992 he co-organized several conferences in honor of Martin Gardner (Gathering for Gardner, G4G).

Berlekamp had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1999 and of the National Academy of Engineering since 1977 . He was a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and, since 1996, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

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References

  1. ↑ Elwyn Berlekamp Died April 9, 2019 , computationalcomplexity.org, accessed April 13, 2019
  2. ↑ He himself never got a degree in mathematics.
  3. ^ Homepage in Berkeley
  4. ↑ Berlekamp on his work in coding theory ; the Berlekamp algorithm is used to invert matrices with constant diagonals over arbitrary bodies. It was used by James Massey to synthesize linear shift registers at a given output and is often used in the decoding of codes.
  5. ↑ according to Lloyd Welch, who developed these algorithms with Berlekamp at Cyclotomics in the early 1980s. It is patented.
  6. ↑ It was then called Kodak Berkeley Research
  7. ↑ Berlekamp on his economic activities
  8. ↑ Berlekamp on his analysis of cheese boxes
  9. ↑ Berlekamp and Axcom on its website at the University of Berkeley
personal data
SURNAME Berlekamp, ​​Elwyn
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berlekamp, ​​Elwyn Ralph (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician and computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Dover , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 2019