Biography
Berlekamp was born in Dover, Ohio. While an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was a Putnam Fellow in 1961. He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering in 1962. Continuing his studies at MIT, he finished his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1964; his advisors were Claude Shannon, Robert G. Gallager, Peter Elias and John Wozencraft. Berlekamp taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1964 until 1966, when he became a researcher at Bell Labs. In 1971, Berlekamp returned to Berkeley where, as of 2010, he is a Professor of the Graduate School.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1977) and the National Academy of Sciences (1999). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012. He received in 1991 the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, and in 1998 the Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society.
Berlekamp is one of the inventors of the Welch-Berlekamp and Berlekamp–Massey algorithms, which are used to implement Reed–Solomon error correction. In the mid-1980s, he was president of Cyclotomics, Inc., a corporation which developed error-correcting code technology. With John Horton Conway and Richard K. Guy, he co-authored Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, leading to his recognition as one of the founders of combinatorial game theory. He has studied various games, including Fox and Geese and other fox games, dots and boxes, and, especially, Go. With David Wolfe, Berlekamp co-authored the book Mathematical Go, which describes methods for analyzing certain classes of Go endgames.
Outside of mathematics and computer science, Berlekamp is active in money management. In 1986, on behalf of Axcom Trading Advisors, a futures trading company, Berlekamp began information-theoretic studies of commodity and financial futures. In 1989, Berlekamp owned the largest interest in Axcom. After the firm's futures trading algorithms were rewritten, Axcom's flagship fund had a return (in 1990) of 55%, net of all management fees and transaction costs. Today, this fund is known as the Medallion Fund and is managed by James Harris Simons and his Renaissance Technologies Corporation.
Berlekamp and his wife Jennifer have two daughters and a son and live in Piedmont, California.
Read more about this topic: Elwyn Berlekamp
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