Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910 – July 16, 1981) was a Polish-born

American Jewish American Jews (; ) or Jewish Americans are American citizens who are Jewish, whether by culture, ethnicity, or religion. According to a 2020 poll conducted by Pew Research, approximately two thirds of American Jews identify as Ashkenazi, 3% ide ...

statistician A statistician is a person who works with Theory, theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private sector, private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, a ...

and

Shannon Award The Claude E. Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society was created to honor consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. Each Shannon Award winner is expected to present a Shannon Lecture at the following ...

-winning

information theorist Information is an abstract concept that refers to something which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the interpretation (perhaps formally) of that which may be sensed, or their abstractions. Any natur ...

. He was the father of former

United States Deputy Secretary of Defense The deputy secretary of defense (acronym: DepSecDef) is a statutory office () and the second-highest-ranking official in the Department of Defense of the United States of America. The deputy secretary is the principal civilian deputy to the se ...

and

World Bank Group The World Bank Group (WBG) is a family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries. It is the largest and best-known development bank in the world and an observer at the United Nations Development Group ...

President

Paul Wolfowitz Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is an American political scientist and diplomat who served as the 10th President of the World Bank, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, and dean of Paul H. Nitze Scho ...

Early life and education

Wolfowitz was born in 1910 in

Warsaw Warsaw, officially the Capital City of Warsaw, is the capital and List of cities and towns in Poland, largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the Vistula, River Vistula in east-central Poland. Its population is officially estimated at ...

, Poland, the son of Helen (Pearlman) and Samuel Wolfowitz. 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 The City College of the City University of New York (also known as the City College of New York, or simply City College or CCNY) is a Public university, public research university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in 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

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

. While a part-time graduate student, Wolfowitz met

Abraham Wald Abraham Wald (; ; , ; – ) was a Hungarian and American mathematician and statistician who contributed to decision theory, geometry and econometrics, and founded the field of sequential analysis. One of his well-known statistical works was ...

, with whom he collaborated in numerous joint papers in the field of

mathematical statistics Mathematical statistics is the application of probability theory and other mathematical concepts to statistics, as opposed to techniques for collecting statistical data. Specific mathematical techniques that are commonly used in statistics inc ...

. This collaboration continued until Wald's death in an airplane crash in 1950. In 1951, Wolfowitz became a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

of mathematics at

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

, where he stayed until 1970. From 1970 to 1978 he was at the

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...

. He died of a

heart attack A myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when Ischemia, blood flow decreases or stops in one of the coronary arteries of the heart, causing infarction (tissue death) to the heart muscle. The most common symptom ...

Tampa Tampa ( ) is a city on the Gulf Coast of the United States, Gulf Coast of the U.S. state of Florida. Tampa's borders include the north shore of Tampa Bay and the east shore of Old Tampa Bay. Tampa is the largest city in the Tampa Bay area and t ...

, Florida, where he had become a professor at the

University of South Florida The University of South Florida (USF) is a Public university, public research university with its main campus located in Tampa, Florida, Tampa, Florida, United States, and other campuses in St. Petersburg, Florida, St. Petersburg and Sarasota, ...

after retiring from Illinois. Wolfowitz's main contributions were in the fields of

statistical decision theory Decision theory or the theory of rational choice is a branch of probability, economics, and analytic philosophy that uses expected utility and probability to model how individuals would behave rationally under uncertainty. It differs from the co ...

non-parametric statistics Nonparametric statistics is a type of statistical analysis that makes minimal assumptions about the underlying distribution of the data being studied. Often these models are infinite-dimensional, rather than finite dimensional, as in parametric s ...

sequential analysis In statistics, sequential analysis or sequential hypothesis testing is statistical analysis where the sample size is not fixed in advance. Instead data is evaluated as it is collected, and further sampling is stopped in accordance with a pre-defi ...

, and

information theory Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification (science), quantification, Data storage, storage, and telecommunications, communication of information. The field was established and formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, ...

. One of his results is the strong converse to

Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...

's coding theorem. While Shannon could prove only that the

block error A block error is a common type of error in certain types of digital television transmission, particularly those that use image compression. Its presence in a television image is a telltale sign that 1) the signal is broadcast digitally, as this t ...

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).

References

External links

*. * *Zacks, Shelemyahu
"Biographical Memories: Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910–July 16, 1981)"
''

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

'', n.d. Accessed May 3, 2007. {{DEFAULTSORT:Wolfowitz, Jacob 1910 births 1981 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 20th-century American Jews Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences alumni Cornell University faculty University of South Florida faculty American people of Polish-Jewish descent American Ashkenazi Jews Polish Ashkenazi Jews Jewish American scientists Presidents of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellows of the American Statistical Association Polish emigrants to the United States American probability theorists Fellows of the Econometric Society American mathematical statisticians University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Columbia University faculty City College of New York alumni New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science alumni People from Warsaw

Early life and education

Career

Further reading

References

External links