Name: Peter Elias

Born: November 23, 1923, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA

Death: December 7, 2001 (Age: 78)

  • Pioneer and MIT Professor in the field of information theory and coding theory.
  • In 1955, he introduced convolutional codes as an alternative to block codes.
  • Established the binary erasure channel and proposed list decoding of error-correcting codes as an alternative to unique decoding.

Honors and awards

  • IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (2002).
  • Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society (1998).