Jessie MacWilliams

Florence Jessie Collinson MacWilliams (4 January 1917 – 27 May 1990) was an English

Education and career

MacWilliams was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England and studied at the University of Cambridge, receiving her BA in 1938 and her MA in the following year.^[3] She moved to the United States in 1939 and studied at Johns Hopkins University. One year later she left Johns Hopkins for Harvard University.

In 1955 she became a

From 1962 to 1976, Macwilliams produced important results on algebraic constructions and combinatorial properties of codes. She worked on cyclic codes, generalizing them to Abelian group codes.^[6] With H.B. Mann, MacWilliams gave a solution to a difficult problem involving certain design matrices, which they published in their paper titled "On the p-rank of the design matrix of a difference set".^[7]

One of MacWilliams' significant achievements was her encyclopedic book, The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes, which she wrote in collaboration with Neil Sloane^[1][8] and was published in 1977. The book is stated as being "Perhaps the most comprehensive text on the algebraic and combinatorial properties of error-correcting codes, and of abiding interest to both mathematicians and engineers. It was one of the major works responsible for laying the foundation for a revolution in communication technology that is being played out even today".^[9]

Recognition

In 1980 she was the first