Vera Pless

Vera Pless ( born March 5, 1931 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American mathematician who is one of the leading experts on error-correcting codes.

Pless is the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia and was originally named Vera Stepen. First, she wanted to be a classical musician ( cello ), but was pushed by her father at a young age to study mathematics at the University of Chicago, where she was particularly influenced by Irving Kaplansky. You, in 1952, her master's degree and married in the same year, a fellow student who studied physics and experimental particle physicist was. She received her Ph.D. in 1957 from Northwestern University with Alex Rosenberg (The continuous transformation ring of biorthogonal bases spaces ). After she had her second child, she taught at Boston University, in the vicinity of her husband's local effect at MIT, but devoted himself mainly to their children.

From 1963 to 1972 she worked as mathematicians to error-correcting codes at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in Cambridge (Massachusetts ). In addition to fundamental work on error-correcting codes, they also published further on ring theory.

After the U.S. Department of Defense had the basic research limited, she did research from 1972 on at MIT and in 1975 professor at the University of Chicago. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Writings

• Introduction to the theory of error -correcting codes, Wiley 1982, 2nd edition 1989
• With W. Cary Huffman: Fundamentals of error correcting codes, Cambridge University Press 2003
• With Huffman, Richard A. Brualdi Handbook of coding theory, North Holland 1998
• Janet Beissinger Crypto Club. Using mathematics to make and break secret codes, AK Peters 2006