J. J. Stiffler

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Jack Justin Stiffler (1934–2019) was an American

fault-tolerant computing
.

Education and career

Stiffler (right) with his college roommates

Stiffler was born May 22, 1934, in

Fulbright scholarship[3] returned to Caltech, where he completed his PhD in 1962. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi.[2]

In 1959 he began part-time work in the Communications Systems Research Section of the

Raytheon Company in Sudbury, Massachusetts, where he worked on advanced communications systems.[2]

In 1981 he founded Sequoia Systems Incorporated in

NASDAQ exchange.[4]

Stiffler died March 24, 2019, in Watsonville, California.[4]

Research

Stiffler in the 1980s

Stiffler was author or coauthor of numerous papers and books, and was awarded several hundred patents.[4] His thesis, "Self-synchronizing binary telemetry codes", supervised by

Solomon Golomb, combined the ideas of binary orthogonal codes (in which codewords are completely uncorrelated with one other) and self-synchronizing codes
(in which there is no ambiguity about the positions of the boundaries between code words); he found constructions of self-synchronizing binary orthogonal codes for all codeword lengths greater than or equal to four, and proved nonexistence for all shorter lengths.[6]

In 1964 he developed the puncturing technique[7] (and proved the Solomon–Stiffler bound)[8] with Gustave Solomon, and coauthored Digital Communications with Space Applications with Golomb, Andrew Viterbi and two others.[9] His 1971 book Theory of Synchronous Communications

deep space program;[11]
a review called it "unparalleled in its comprehensive treatment of the synchronization problems of time-discrete communications" and "a landmark in the theoretical development" of the subject.[12]

In 1971 he edited a special issue, on

error correcting codes, of IEEE Transactions on Communication Technology,[13]
and in 1980 he edited a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Computers surveying fault-tolerant computing.[14]

In 1975 he was made a

Fellow of the IEEE,[15] a distinction reserved for IEEE members with "extraordinary record[s] of accomplishment".[16]

References

  1. ^ The 1956 Harvard yearbook. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Yearbook Publications. 1956.
  2. ^ a b c See:
  3. ^ Harvard College Class of 1956. Triennial report. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Crimson Printing Co. 1959.
  4. ^ a b c d "Obituaries. Jack Justin Stiffler". Harvard Magazine. September–October 2019. p. 72L.
  5. S2CID 12418470
    .
  6. ^ See:
  7. ^ See:
  8. MR 0740436
    .
  9. ^ Golomb, Solomon W.; Baumert, Leonard D.; Easterling, Mahlon F.; Stiffler, J. J.; Viterbi, Andrew J. (1964). Digital Communications with Space Applications. Prentice-Hall.
  10. ^ Stiffler, J. J. (1971). Theory of Synchronous Communications. Prentice-Hall.
  11. doi:10.1109/MCOM.1984.1091955
    .
  12. doi:10.1109/TIT.1972.1054730
    .
  13. ^ Stiffler, J .J., ed. (October 1971). "Special issue on error-correcting codes". IEEE Transactions on Communication Technology. COM-19 (5 Pt. 2).
  14. ^ Stiffler, J.J., ed. (June 1980). "Special issue on fault-tolerant computing". IEEE Transactions on Computers. C-29 (6).
  15. ^ IEEE Communications Society. "Membership. IEEE Fellows 1975". Retrieved September 8, 2019.
  16. ^ "About the IEEE Fellow program". www.ieee.org. Retrieved September 8, 2019.
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