Peter Elias (November 23, 1923 – December 7, 2001) was a pioneer in the field of information theory. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty from 1953 to 1991.
In 1955, Elias introduced convolutional codes as an alternative to block codes. He also established the binary erasure channel and proposed list decoding of error-correcting codes as an alternative to unique decoding.
Elias received in 1998 a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society; and in 2002 the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, for "fundamental and pioneering contributions to information theory and its applications".
He died at 78 of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Famous quotes containing the word peter:
“That matches are made in heaven, may be, but my wife would have been just the wife for Peter the Great, or Peter Piper. How would she have set in order that huge littered empire of the one, and with indefatigable painstaking picked the peck of pickled peppers for the other.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)