Robert G. Gallager

Robert Gray Gallager (born May 29, 1931 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American electrical engineer known for his work on information theory and communications networks. He was elected an IEEE Fellow in 1968, a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1979, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1992, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 1999. He received the Claude E. Shannon Award from the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1983. He also received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1990 "For fundamental contributions to communications coding techniques", the Marconi Prize in 2003, and a Dijkstra Prize in 2004, among other honors. Currently (2008) he is Professor Emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953, and the S.M. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering from M.I.T. in 1957 and 1960, respectively. He was a member of the technical staff at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1953-1954 and then served in the U.S. Signal Corps from 1954 to 1956. He has been a faculty member at M.I.T. since 1960 where he was Co-Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems from 1986 to 1998, was named Fujitsu Professor in 1988, and became Professor Emeritus in 2001. He was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965 and a Visiting Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris, in 1978.

Gallager's 1960 Sc.D. thesis, Low Density Parity Check Codes, was published by the M.I.T Press as a monograph in 1963. An abbreviated version appeared earlier (January 1962) in the IRE Transactions on Information Theory and was republished in the 1974 IEEE Press volume, Key Papers in The Development of Information Theory, edited by Elwyn Berlekamp. This paper won an IEEE Information Theory Society Golden-Jubilee Paper Award in 1998 and its subject matter is a very active area of research today. Gallager's January 1965 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, "A Simple Derivation of the Coding Theorem and some Applications, won the 1966 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award "for the most outstanding paper, reporting original work, in the Transactions, Journals and Magazines of the IEEE Societies, or in the Proceedings of the IEEE" and also won another IEEE Information Theory Society Golden-Jubilee Paper Award in 1998. His book, Information Theory and Reliable Communication, Wiley 1968, placed Information Theory on a sound mathematical foundation and is still considered by many as the standard textbook on information theory.

In the mid-1970s, Gallager's research focus shifted to data networks, focusing on distributed algorithms, routing, congestion control, and random access techniques. Data Networks, Prentice Hall, 1988, second edition 1992, co-authored with Dimitri Bertsekas, helped provide a conceptual foundation for this field. His June 1993 joint paper with Abhay K. Parekh, "A generalized processor sharing approach to flow control" in ISN won the IEEE Communication Society's William Bennett Prize Paper Award "for the best original paper published in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking in the past year" and a preliminary version won the Prize Paper Award for Infocom 1993.

In the 1990s, Gallager's interests shifted back to information theory and to stochastic processes. He wrote the 1996 textbook, Discrete Stochastic Processes. Gallager's current interests are in information theory, wireless communication, all optical networks, data networks, and stochastic processes.

Over the years, Gallager has taught and mentored many graduate students, many of whom are now themselves leading researchers in their fields. He received the M.I.T. Graduate Student Council Teaching Award for 1993.

Gallager's latest textbook, Principles of Digital Communication was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008.

Gallager was instrumental in the founding of Codex Corporation in 1962 (now part of Motorola) and consulted there for many years. He served Codex as Acting Vice President for Research in 1971-1972. His fundamental studies on quadrature amplitude modulation and detection led directly to the 9600 bit/s modems that provided Codex's commercial success. He has also consulted for the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory and a number of other companies. He has been granted five patents on his inventions.

Gallager was President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1971, a member of its Board of Governors from 1965 to 1972 and again from 1979 to 1988. He served the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory as Associate Editor for Coding 1963-1964 and as Associate Editor for Computer Communications from 1977 to 1980. He was Chairman of the Advisory committee to the National Science Foundation Division on Networking and Communication Research and Infrastructure from 1989 to 1992, and has been on numerous visiting committees for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments.

Personal Life: Gallager has 3 kids and 7 grandchildren, and is married to Marie Gallager