Elwyn Berlekamp is a Professor of Mathematics at the Univerisity of California, Berkley. As a researcher in the fields of Error Correcting Codes he shared the discovery of Berlekamp-Massey Algorithm with James Massey. He also has done a substantial amount of research in the fields of Finance, Information Theory, Games, and Algorithms.
Biographical Information
Born on September 6, 1940, he attended the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his
B.S.,
M.S., and
Ph.D., which he recieved in 1964. In 1964, he joined the
faculty of the
Univerisity of California, Berkley as an Associate Professor of
Electricial Engineering. He left for a short while in 1967 to join
Bell Telephone Laboratories but returned to academic life at
Berkley in 1971 as a full
Professor. He also founded a company called
Cyclotomics (now owned by
Kodak), which is the provider high-speed error control systems for
NASA. In addition, all commercial compact disc players use some
Reed-Solomon Codes with Berlekamp Decoding.
Prof. Berlekamp is currently
embroiled in a legal battle with a
Sam Sloan of
Ishi Press International over the distribution of several works on
Go, for which the latter is owed royalties (United States District Court, San Jose Branch docket# C-95 20678 RMW), though he is named as a defendant and counter-claimant, there appears to be little more than unfortunate association.
Awards
Awards from the IEEE
From 1979 until 1994, he held 12 patents, all of which are now in the public domain. They covered topics such as: Galois Field Computer (#4162480), Transparent Synchronization (#4731676), Elongated Burst Trapping (#4958348). All of which deal in some way with the field of Information Theory.
Sources:
Ishi Press website, ishipress.com
Documents of the US District Court, San Jose Branch
Professor Berlekamp's personal website