- Jacob Wolfowitz
Jacob Wolfowitz,
Ph.D. (March 19 ,1910 –July 16 ,1981 ) was a Polish-born Americanstatistician and Shannon Award-winning information theorist. He was the father of former Deputy Secretary of Defense andWorld Bank Group PresidentPaul Wolfowitz .Born in
Warsaw ,Poland in 1910, he emigrated with his parents to theUnited States in 1920. In the mid-1930s, Wolfowitz began his career as high-school mathematics teacher and continued teaching until 1942 when he received hisPh.D. degree inmathematics fromNew York University . While a part-time graduate student, Wolfowitz metAbraham Wald , with whom he collaborated in numerous joint papers in the field ofmathematical statistics . This collaboration continued until Wald's death in an airplane crash in 1950. In 1951, Wolfowitz became aprofessor of mathematics atCornell University , where he stayed until 1970. He died of a heart attack inTampa ,Florida , where he was a professor at theUniversity of South Florida .Wolfowitz's main contributions were in the fields of statistical decision theory,
non-parametric statistics ,sequential analysis , andinformation theory .Books
* Kiefer, J., ed. "Jacob Wolfowitz Selected Papers". New York:
Springer-Verlag , 1980. ISBN 0387904638.
* Wolfowitz, Jacob. "Coding Theorems of Information Theory." New York: Springer-Verlag, 1978. ISBN 0387085483.Biographical accounts
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*Zacks, Shelemyahu. [http://books.nap.edu/html/biomems/jwolfowitz.html "Biographical Memories: Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910–July 16, 1981)"] . "National Academy of Sciences", n.d. AccessedMay 3 ,2007 .
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