David Slepian

David S. Slepian (* June 30, 1923 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, † 29 November 2007) was an American mathematician.

He was the son of Joseph Slepian (1891-1969), the research as an electrical engineer at Westinghouse, but had a doctorate in mathematics. Slepian studied physics at the University of Michigan and in 1949 received his doctorate at Harvard University in physics. Previously, he was an officer in the erected to deceive the Germans in the Normandy landings ghost army in the U.S. Army. As a post - graduate student, he was at the University of Cambridge and the Sorbonne. After that he went as a scientist at the Mathematical Research Center at Bell Laboratories, where he initially worked on a wide variety of mathematical topics, dealt with the theory of switching networks and their logic and even participated in a warhead of NIKE missile. Later he turned to coding theory, information theory and communication theory. In the 1970s he taught at the University of Hawaii, but returned in the 1980s back to the Bell Labs.

In 1956 he introduced the concept of binary group code.

He examined with HJ Landau and HO Pollak discrete elongated spheroids (Discrete prolate spheroidical wavefunctions, DPSWF ) and consequences ( DPSS ), which were later named after him Slepians. They have the property of being orthogonal to both the unrestricted real line and in a given finite interval. Slepian and his colleagues used it to characterize the bandwidth of electrical signals, and they play a fundamental role in the multitaper method for the estimation of the power spectrum of a signal ( David J. Thomson, 1982).

Slepian 's Lemma (1962 ) in probability theory was proved by him and named after him. With Jack Keil Wolf, he scored fundamental results in the coding of multiple sources ( Slepian Wolf Coding, 1973).

In 1982 he was John von Neumann Lecturer. In 1974 he was Shannon Lecturer of the IEEE. In 1981 he received the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal and 1984, the IEEE Centennial Medal. He was Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1977 ), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering ( 1976).

His wife, Jan, Slepian ( born 1921 ) is known as a children's book author.