W. Wesley Peterson

William Wesley Peterson ( born April 22, 1924 in Muskegon, Michigan; † 6 May, 2009 Honolulu, Hawaii) was an American mathematician and electrical engineer.

Life and work

Peterson studied at the University of Michigan with a bachelor 's degree in mathematics in 1948 and in Applied Mathematics (Engineering Mathematics ) 1949, the master's degree in electrical engineering in 1950 and the Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1954. Afterwards it was until 1956 an engineer at IBM in Poughkeepsie. In 1956 he became associate professor at the University of Florida and since 1964 he was a professor of computer science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

He was Visiting Professor at the National Chiao Tung University (1963 /64), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1959 /60) and the University of Hiroshima ( 1999). He wrote a standard work on error correcting codes. In 1961 he developed the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC). He also dealt with the theory of signal detection, programming languages, systems programming, and networks.

Peterson received the 1981 Claude E. Shannon Award, 1984, the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1999 and the Japan Prize. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM. He was married to Hiromi Nakai since 1972 and has five children.

Writings

• Error Correcting Codes. MIT Press, 1961 (2nd edition with EJ Weldon 1972). German translation: Testable and correctable codes. Oldenbourg, 1967.