David Slepian

David S. Slepian (June 30, 1923 – November 29, 2007) was an American mathematician.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania he studied B.Sc. at University of Michigan before joining the forces in World War II, as Sonic deception officer in the Ghost army. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1949, for a dissertation in physics. After post-doctoral work at University of Cambridge and University of Sorbonne, he worked at the Mathematics Research Center at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he pioneered work in algebraic coding theory on group codes, first published in the paper A Class of Binary Signaling Alphabets. Here, he also worked along with other information theory giants as Claude Shannon and Richard Hamming. He also proved the possibility of singular detection, a perhaps unintuitive result. He is also known for Slepian's lemma in probability theory (1962), and for discovering a fundamental result in distributed source coding called Slepian-Wolf coding with Jack Keil Wolf (1973).

He later joined the University of Hawaii. His father was Joseph Slepian, also a scientist.^[1] His wife is the noted children's author Jan Slepian.

Awards

• IEEE Fellow
• Fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics
• Claude E. Shannon Award from the IEEE Information Theory Group 1974, and due to this also the Shannon Lecturer 1974.^[2]
• National Academy of Engineering elected member 1976^[3]
• National Academy of Sciences elected member 1977^[4]
• IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal 1981^[5]
• IEEE Centennial Medal 1984
• Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics’s John von Neumann lecture award 1982
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected member

External links

• Memorial website

References

1. ^ "IEEE Global History Network - David Slepian". IEEE. http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/David_Slepian. Retrieved February 22, 2011 (2011-02-22). 
2. ^ "Claude E. Shannon Award". IEEE Information Theory Society. http://www.itsoc.org/honors/claude-e.-shannon-award/. Retrieved February 22, 2011 (2011-02-22). 
3. ^ "NAE Members Directory - Dr. David Slepian". United States National Academy of Engineering. http://www.nae.edu/MembersSection/Directory20412/28545.aspx. Retrieved February 22, 2011 (2011-02-22). 
4. ^ "Search Deceased Member Data". United States National Academy of Sciences. http://www.nasonline.org/site/Dir?sid=1021&view=basic&pg=srch. Retrieved February 22, 2011 (2011-02-22). 
5. ^ "IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal Recipients". IEEE. http://www.ieee.org/documents/bell_rl.pdf. Retrieved February 22, 2011 (2011-02-22). 

Awards
Preceded by Richard R. Hough	IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal 1981	Succeeded by Harold Rosen

Persondata
Name	Slepian, David S.
Alternative names
Short description	mathematician
Date of birth	June 30, 1923
Place of birth	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Date of death	November 29, 2007
Place of death