Peter Elias

Peter Elias (born November 23, 1923 in New Brunswick , New Jersey, † December 7, 2001 in Cambridge , Massachusetts) was an American scientist and professor of information theory at MIT . He was an important pioneer of information theory and coding theory ( error-correcting codes ).

Life

Elias was the son of an engineer who worked in Thomas A. Edison's laboratory . He studied at Swarthmore College and from 1942 at MIT, where he made a bachelor's degree in technical business administration (business management, engineering management) in 1944 and then served in the Navy as a radio technology teacher. After his release in 1946, he continued his studies at Harvard University , where he received his doctorate. In 1953 he became Assistant Professor, 1957 Associate Professor and 1960 Professor at MIT. From 1960 to 1966 he headed the electrical engineering and computer science department (EECS) there. From 1982 to 1983 he was deputy head (alongside Joel Moses ) of IT. 1970 to 1972 he was Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and from 1974 Edwin S. Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering. From 1976 he was at the Laboratory for Informatics (Computer Science) at MIT. Among other things, he was visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1967/69), at Imperial College in London (1975/76) and at Harvard (1983/84). He died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease .

In 1955 he introduced convolutional codes as an alternative to block codes as error-correcting codes. Also in the 1950s he introduced list decoding for error-correcting codes: instead of a decoding response, a list is generated in the event of higher error rates. In 1954 he introduced product codes (as a multiplication of two block codes). In 1954 he introduced the binary cancellation channel as a model for communication channels.

The Information Theory Society of the IEEE honored him in 1997 with their highest honor, the Claude E. Shannon Award and in 1998 for the invention of the convolutional code with the "Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation". Shortly before his death, he received the Richard W. Hamming Medal of the IEEE. In addition to many other honors, he was a fellow of the IEEE and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , a member of the National Academy of Engineering , the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961). He was a co-founder and co-editor of Information and Control magazine .

In 1966 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow ( Networks of Gaussian channels with applications to feedback systems ).

Fonts

• Error-Free coding , IRE Transactions (Professional Group on Information Theory, PGIT), PGIT-4, 1954, pp. 29-37
• Coding for noisy channels , IRE Convention Record, Part 4, 1955, pp. 37-46
• Coding for two noisy channels , in Colin Cherry (Ed.) Information Theory , Academic Press 1956, pp. 61-74
• Computation in the presence of noise , IBM J. Res. Development, Volume 2, 1958, pp. 346-353
• Networks of Gaussian channels with applications to feedback systems , IEEE Trans. Information Theory, Volume 13, 1967, pp. 493-501
• Universal Codeword Sets and Representations of the Integers , IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume 21, March 1975, pp. 194-203.
• Interval and Recency Rank Source Coding: Two On-line Adaptive Variable-length Schemes , IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume 33, January 1987, pp. 3-10.

literature

• Elwyn R. Berlekamp : Key Papers in the Development of Coding Theory, NewYork, IEEE Press, pp. 39-47, 1974.

Web links

• MIT Professor Peter Elias dies at 78; What computer science pioneer , obituary by Robert J. Sales, December 10, 2001

swell

1. ↑ James L. Massey : Obituary Peter Elias, 1923-2001 . In: IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter . Vol. 52, No. 1 , March 2002, ISSN  1059-2362 , pp. 1–4 ( online as PDF (4.2 MB); web copy ( memento from December 12, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )).