Jack Wolf

Jack Keil Wolf ( born March 14, 1935 in Newark, New Jersey, † May 12, 2011 in La Jolla, California ) was an American computer scientist, known for contributions to coding theory and information theory.

Wolf studied at the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor 's degree in 1956 and in 1960 received his doctorate from Princeton University with John Bowman Thomas in Electrical Engineering ( On the detection and estimation for multiple problem- nonstationary random processes ). From 1960 to 1962 he was instructor at Syracuse University, 1963-1965 Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at New York University and then associate professor and later professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. 1971/72 he was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii. In 1973 he became a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst ( and worked at the RCA Laboratories and Bell Laboratories ) and 1985 professor at the University of California, San Diego, as Stephen O. Rice Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. At the same time, he was with Qualcomm, where he was Vice President of Technology.

With David Slepian he achieved fundamental results in the coding of multiple sources ( Slepian Wolf Coding, 1973). Later he dealt with the application of information theory to data storage.

In 1974, he was President of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He was a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences ( 2010), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005) and the National Academy of Engineering ( 1993). In 2011 he received the Marconi Prize in 2004, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, in 1998 the IEEE Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the 2001 Claude E. Shannon Award. In 1979 he was Guggenheim Fellow.