Irving S. Reed

Irving S. Reed

Irving Stoy Reed (November 12, 1923 in Seattle, Washington – September 11, 2012) was a mathematician and engineer. He is best known for co-inventing a class of algebraic error-correcting and error-detecting codes known as Reed–Solomon codes in collaboration with Gustave Solomon. He also co-invented the Reed–Muller code.

Reed made many contributions to areas of electrical engineering including radar, signal processing, and image processing. He was part of the team that built the MADDIDA, guidance system for Northrop's Snark cruise missile – one of the first digital computers. He developed and introduced the now-standard Register Transfer Language to the computer community while at M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory. He had been a faculty member of the Electrical Engineering-Systems Department of the University of Southern California from 1962 to 1993.

Reed was a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1979) and a Fellow of the IEEE (1973), a winner of the Claude E. Shannon Award, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (1989) and with Gustave Solomon, the 1995 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Award. In 1998 Reed received a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society.