Jacob Wolfowitz
Jacob Wolfowitz | |
---|---|
Wolfowitz in 1970 (photo courtesy of MFO) | |
Born | March 19, 1910 Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire |
Died | July 16, 1981 (aged 71) Tampa, Florida, United States |
Nationality | American |
Education | City University of New York |
Known for | Wald–Wolfowitz runs test |
Spouse | Lillian Dundes |
Children | Laura W. Sachs, Paul Wolfowitz |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Statistics |
Institutions | University of South Florida |
Doctoral advisor | Donald Flanders |
Doctoral students | Albert H. Bowker |
Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910 – July 16, 1981) was a Polish-born American Jewish statistician and Shannon Award-winning information theorist. He was the father of former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense and World Bank Group President Paul Wolfowitz.
Early life and education
Wolfowitz was born in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland, the son of Helen (Pearlman) and Samuel Wolfowitz.[1] He emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1920. He received a bachelor of science in 1931 from the City College of New York.
Career
In the mid-1930s, Wolfowitz began his career as a high school mathematics teacher and continued teaching until 1942 when he received his Ph.D. degree in mathematics from New York University. While a part-time graduate student, Wolfowitz met Abraham Wald, with whom he collaborated in numerous joint papers in the field of mathematical statistics. This collaboration continued until Wald's death in an airplane crash in 1950. In 1951, Wolfowitz became a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, where he stayed until 1970. From 1970 to 1978 he was at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He died of a heart attack in Tampa, Florida, where he had become a professor at the University of South Florida after retiring from Illinois.
Wolfowitz's main contributions were in the fields of statistical decision theory, non-parametric statistics, sequential analysis, and information theory.
One of his results is the strong converse to Claude Shannon's coding theorem. While Shannon could prove only that the block error probability can not become arbitrarily small if the transmission rate is above the channel capacity, Wolfowitz proved that the block error rate actually converges to one. As a consequence, Shannon's original result is today termed "the weak theorem" (sometimes also Shannon's "conjecture" by some authors).
Further reading
- Kiefer, J., ed. Jacob Wolfowitz Selected Papers. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1980. ISBN 0-387-90463-8.
- Wolfowitz, Jacob, Coding Theorems of Information Theory. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1978. ISBN 0-387-08548-3.
References
- ^ Biographical Memoirs. National Academies Press. 2003-05-07. ISBN 9780309086981.
External links
- Jacob Wolfowitz at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Jacob Wolfowitz", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- Zacks, Shelemyahu. "Biographical Memories: Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910–July 16, 1981)". National Academy of Sciences, n.d. Accessed May 3, 2007.
- v
- t
- e
- 1972 Claude E. Shannon
- 1973
- 1974 David S. Slepian
- 1975
- 1976 Robert M. Fano
- 1977 Peter Elias
- 1978 Mark Semenovich Pinsker
- 1979 Jacob Wolfowitz
- 1980
- 1981 W. Wesley Peterson
- 1982 Irving S. Reed
- 1983 Robert G. Gallager
- 1984
- 1985 Solomon W. Golomb
- 1986 William Lucas Root
- 1987
- 1988 James Massey
- 1989
- 1990 Thomas M. Cover
- 1991 Andrew Viterbi
- 1992
- 1993 Elwyn Berlekamp
- 1994 Aaron D. Wyner
- 1995 George David Forney
- 1996 Imre Csiszár
- 1997 Jacob Ziv
- 1998 Neil Sloane
- 1999 Tadao Kasami
- 2000 Thomas Kailath
- 2001 Jack Keil Wolf
- 2002 Toby Berger
- 2003 Lloyd R. Welch
- 2004 Robert McEliece
- 2005 Richard Blahut
- 2006 Rudolf Ahlswede
- 2007 Sergio Verdú
- 2008 Robert M. Gray
- 2009 Jorma Rissanen
- 2010 Te Sun Han
- 2011 Shlomo Shamai (Shitz)
- 2012 Abbas El Gamal
- 2013 Katalin Marton
- 2014 János Körner
- 2015 Robert Calderbank
- 2016 Alexander Holevo
- 2017 David Tse
- 2018 Gottfried Ungerboeck
- 2019 Erdal Arıkan
- 2020 Charles Bennett
- 2021 Alon Orlitsky
- 2022 Raymond W. Yeung
- 2023 Rüdiger Urbanke
- 2024 Andrew Barron