Jacob Wolfowitz

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Jacob Wolfowitz
Wolfowitz in 1970 (photo courtesy of MFO)
Born	March 19, 1910 Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire
Died	July 16, 1981 (aged 71) Tampa, Florida, United States
Nationality	American
Education	City University of New York
Known for	Wald–Wolfowitz runs test
Spouse	Lillian Dundes
Children	Laura W. Sachs, Paul Wolfowitz
Scientific career
Fields	Statistics
Institutions	University of South Florida
Doctoral advisor	Donald Flanders
Doctoral students	Albert H. Bowker

Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910 – July 16, 1981) was a Polish-born American Jewish statistician and Shannon Award-winning information theorist. He was the father of former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense and World Bank Group President Paul Wolfowitz.

Early life and education

Wolfowitz was born in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland, the son of Helen (Pearlman) and Samuel Wolfowitz.^[1] He emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1920. He received a bachelor of science in 1931 from the City College of New York.

Career

In the mid-1930s, Wolfowitz began his career as a high school mathematics teacher and continued teaching until 1942 when he received his Ph.D. degree in

One of his results is the strong converse to Claude Shannon's coding theorem. While Shannon could prove only that the block error probability can not become arbitrarily small if the transmission rate is above the channel capacity, Wolfowitz proved that the block error rate actually converges to one. As a consequence, Shannon's original result is today termed "the weak theorem" (sometimes also Shannon's "conjecture" by some authors).

Further reading

• ISBN 0-387-90463-8
  .
• Wolfowitz, Jacob, Coding Theorems of Information Theory. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1978.
  ISBN 0-387-08548-3
  .