On February 13, 1998, the National Academy of Engineering announced the names of the individuals most recently elected to its ranks. The list of new electees included three current members of the Information Theory Society: Bob McEliece, David Middleton, and Neil Sloane. A short biography for each follows. Also elected were two past members of the Information Theory Society: James Spilker, Jr. and Thomas Stockham, Jr. The induction ceremony will take place on October 4, 1998. The citations for all five electees follow.
Robert J. McEliece -- For error-correcting codes and cryptography.
David Middleton -- For statistical communications theory and applications.
Neil A. Sloane -- For coding theory and its applications.
James J. Spilker, Jr. -- For spread spectrum technology, communications theory, and the global positioning systems.
Thomas G. Stockham, Jr. -- For contributions to the field of digital audio recording.
Bob McEliece was born in Washington, D.C. on May 21, 1942. He obtained his B.S. in mathematics from Caltech in 1964, and spent academic 1964-1965 at Trinity College, U. Cambridge, England, where among other things he attended the famous Ernst Selmer lectures on linear recurrence relations over finite fields. Returning to Caltech in 1965, he went onto obtain his Ph.D. in mathematics under the guidance of Professor Marshall Hall, Jr. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled
``Linear Recurring Sequences over Finite Fields.''
In 1963, McEliece, as an undergraduate, began work in communications research at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the group originally lead by Sol Golomb, and then by Ed Posner. There he met Gus Solomon, who introduced him to algebraic coding theory, a lifelong interest. He was at JPL for 15 years, and his colleagues there included Len Baumert, Gene Rodemich, Howard Rumsey, and Lloyd Welch.
In 1978, he left JPL to become a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a Professor of Mathematics and Research professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. At the U. of I. his colleagues included Bruce Hajek, Mike Pursley, Dilip Sarwate, and Vince Poor.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was also a regular consultant with Cyclotomics, Inc., Elwyn Berlekamp's company. He has been a consultant in communication research at JPL continuously since 1978. His current colleagues at JPL include Fabrizio Pollara, Dariush Divsalar, and Sam Dolinar.
In 1982, he moved back to Caltech, as a Professor of Electrical Engineering. In 1990, he was chosen to be Executive Office for Electrical Engineering, a post he still holds. In 1997 he was appointed the first Allen E. Puckett Professor.
He married Laif Swanson, another information theorist, in 1988. He has four children: Angela, 27; Karen, 23; Elizabeth, 20; and David, 7, and has had 23 Ph.D. students, including IT members (listed chronologically) Wayne Stark, Mario Blaum, Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar, Chi-Chao Chao, Oliver Collins, Kumar Sivarajan, Masayuki Hattori, Tommy Cheng, and Wei Lin.
* Has contributed for more than 30 years to the design and analysis of coded deep-space telecommunication systems, as an employee and consultant to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Specific achievements include invention of the Golay coded non-imaging system for the Voyager spacecraft, and intellectual leadership in the design of the ``Big Viterbi Decoder'' for the Galileo mission.
* Has been a major contributor to the theory of error-correcting codes for more than 25 years. Specific achievements include ``McEliece's theorem,'' a deep and powerful tool for analyzing the weight spectrum of cyclic codes, and the ``JPL bound,'' which has been the world record-holder in the basic combinatorial problem of coding since 1977.
* Inventor in 1977 of the ``McEliece public-key cryptosystem,'' which remains as one of only two public-key systems to have withstood the attacks of cryptanalysts (the other is RSA).
Dr. David Middleton is a Physicist, Applied Mathematician and Educator. He was born in New York City on April 19, 1920. He received the A.B. (scl) and A. M. degrees in 1942 and 1945, respectively, from Harvard College and Harvard University. During the war (1942-1945) he was special research assistant to Prof. J. H. Van Vleck (Nobel Laureate in Physics), with whom he took his Ph.D. in 1947 from Harvard University, where he also did postdoctoral studies with Prof. Leon Brillouin (1948). He has been a Special Research Associate, Research Fellow and Assistant Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard. He has also served as Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Columbia University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Hartford Graduate Center) and currently, as well, as Adjunct Professor of Electrical Eng. at the University of Rhode Island and has been Adjunct Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Rice University and a Visiting Professor at the University of Denver, Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas.
Dr. Middleton's general areas of research, teaching and applications are principally: (I) "Statistical Communication Theory" (with particular attention to random processes and signal detection and extraction theory (since 1942)); (II) "Statistical Physics" - propagation and scattering in random media with emphasis on radar applications as well as on the underwater acoustic environment (since 1960); and (III) "Electromagnetic Compatibility" (EMC) - nongaussian noise and interference models and processing for the man-made and natural electromagnetic environment (since 1968). Other areas of current interest are ocean acoustics, optimal system design and various special applications in remote sensing, communications and signal processing.
Dr. Middleton has published over 165 scientific papers and two books in the above areas. His INTRODUCTION TO STATISTICAL COMMUNICATION THEORY (McGraw-Hill, "International Series in Pure and applied Physics," 1960)* and TOPICS IN COMMUNICATION THEORY (McGraw-Hill, 1965) have also published in translation by "Soviet Radio" (Moscow), 1961 and 1966. In addition, he was the Scientific Editor for the English version, 1978, of V. V. Ol'shevskii's "Statistical Methods in Sonar" (Acous. Inst., Acad. of Sciences, USSR), "Studies in Soviet Sciences" (Consultant's Bureau and Plenum, New York and London).
Dr. Middleton is a consulting physicist and independent contractor (since 1954) with universities, industry and various agencies of the Federal Government, including the Departments of Defense, Commerce and Energy and in the past with the Executive Office of the President (Office of Telecommunications Policy). He has been a member of the Naval Research Advisory Committee (and various of its associated advisory boards) (NRAC, 1970-1977) and is currently a member of other advisory boards and committees, such as CCIR (US Study Group 1-E), the Scientific Advisory Board of the (IDA) Supercomputing Research Center (1988-1991) and various editorial boards.
Dr. Middleton, a pioneer of Statistical Communication Theory and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, is also a recipient of various other honors and awards. These include those of the National Electronic Conference, the EMC Society of the IEEE, "Outstanding Authorship and Special Achievement" awards of the Inst. for Telecommunication Sciences (NTIA, US Dept. of Commerce); 3rd International Symposium on EMC (Rotterdam) and others. He is also a Fellow of many scientific and engineering societies, including Fellowship in the American Physical Society, Inst. of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (Life Fellow, IEEE), American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Acoustical Society of America and the New York Academy of Sciences. In addition, he is a member of the Cosmos Club (Washington DC) and a Fellow of Explorers Club (New York City). For further details, see 'Who's Who in America," "Who's Who in Science and Engineering," and Who's Who in the World," (Marquis/Reed-Elsevir).
* Reprint editions, published July 1987-1995 by Peninsula Publishing Co., PO Box 867, Los Altos, CA 94023 and the new "Introduction........" in the New, IEEE PRESS CLASSIC REISSUE Edition, April, 1996.
Neil J. A. Sloane, njas@research.att.com,
AT&T Research Labs, Room C233, 180 Park Ave,
Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971 USA.
Home page: http://www.research.att.com/~njas/
Office phone: (973) 360 8415; fax: (973) 360 8178
B.E.E., University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, 1959.
B. A. (Honours), University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, 1960.
M.S., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1964.
Ph.D., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1967.
Assistant Professor, Elect. Engin. Dept., Cornell Univ., 1967-1969.
Member of Technical Staff, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, 1969-1995.
Principal Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Labs - Research, Murray Hill, NJ, 1996-present.
A Handbook of Integer Sequences, Academic Press, 1973.
A Short Course on Error-Correcting Codes, Springer-Verlag, 1975.
The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes (with F.J.MacWilliams), North-Holland, 1977.
Hadamard Transform Optics (with M. Harwit), Academic Press, 1979.
Sphere-Packings, Lattices and Groups (with J. H. Conway), Springer-Verlag, 2nd edition, 1993.
Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers (edited, with A. D. Wyner), IEEE Press, 1993.
The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (with S. Plouffe), Academic Press, 1995.
Rock Climbing Guide to New Jersey Crags (with Paul Nick), Chockstone Press, 1996.
Member Amer. Math. Soc.
Member Math. Assoc. Amer.
Member Amer. Stat. Assoc.
Fellow Institute Electrical & Electronic Engineers.
Chauvenet Prize, Math. Assoc. Amer., 1979
Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions Information Theory, 1978-1980.
Distinguished Technical Staff Award, Bell Labs, 1983.
The 1984 Earle Raymond Hedrick Lecturer of the Math. Assoc. Amer.
College de France Medal, 1984.
IEEE Centennial Medal, 1984.
1987 Information Theory Society Paper Award (with J. H. Conway).
J. Clarence Karcher Medal, Univ. Oklahoma, 1988.
1995 IEEE Information Theory Society Prize Paper Award
(with A. R. Calderbank, A. R. Hammons, Jr., P. V. Kumar and P. Sole)
1997 Shannon Lecturer of IEEE Information Theory Society.