Robert Gray Gallager (born May 29, 1931) is an American electrical engineer known for his work on

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, ...

and communications networks. Gallager was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

(NAE) in 1979 for contributions to coding and communications theory and practice. He was also elected an

IEEE Fellow , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

in 1968, a member of the

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 ...

(NAS) in 1992, and a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

(AAAS) in 1999. He received the Claude E. Shannon Award from the

IEEE Information Theory Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

in 1983. He also received the

IEEE Centennial Medal The IEEE Centennial Medal was a medal minted and awarded in 1984 ''to persons deserving of special recognition for extraordinary achievement'' to celebrate the Centennial of the founding of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (I ...

in 1984, the

IEEE Medal of Honor The IEEE Medal of Honor is the highest recognition of the American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It has been awarded since 1917, and is presented to an individual or team of up to three who have made exceptional contri ...

in 1990 "For fundamental contributions to communications coding techniques", the

Marconi Prize The Marconi Prize is an annual award recognizing achievements and advancements made in field of communications (radio, mobile, wireless, telecommunications, data communications, networks, and Internet). The prize is awarded by the Marconi Society ...

in 2003, and a Dijkstra Prize in 2004, among other honors. For most of his career he was a professor of

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

Biography

Gallager received the B.S.E.E. degree from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

in 1953. He was a member of the technical staff at the

Bell Telephone Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

in 1953–1954 and then served in the U.S. Signal Corps 1954–1956. He returned to graduate school at the

(MIT), and received the S.M. degree in 1957 and Sc.D. in 1960 in

. He has been a faculty member at MIT since 1960 where he was co-director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems from 1986 to 1998, was named Fujitsu Professor in 1988, and became

Professor Emeritus ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retirement, retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". ...

in 2001. He was a visiting associate professor at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, in 1965 and a visiting professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications,

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

, in 1978. Gallager's 1960 Sc.D. thesis, on

low-density parity-check code Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are a class of error correction codes which (together with the closely-related turbo codes) have gained prominence in coding theory and information theory since the late 1990s. The codes today are widely us ...

s, was published by the

MIT Press The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press publishes a number of academic journals and has been a pioneer in the Open Ac ...

as a

monograph A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...

in 1963. The codes, which remained useful over 50 years, are sometimes called "Gallager codes". An abbreviated version appeared in January 1962 in the IRE ''Transactions on Information Theory'' and was republished in the 1974 IEEE Press volume, ''Key Papers in The Development of Information Theory'', edited by

Elwyn Berlekamp Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp (September 6, 1940 – April 9, 2019) was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award "for the most outstanding paper, reporting original work, in the Transactions, Journals and Magazines of the IEEE Societies, or in the Proceedings of the IEEE" and also won another

Golden-Jubilee Paper Award in 1998. His book, ''Information Theory and Reliable Communication,'' Wiley 1968, placed Information Theory on a sound mathematical foundation and is still considered by many as the standard textbook on information theory. Gallager consulted for Melpar as a graduate student, and for Codex Corporation when it was founded in 1962. He served Codex as acting vice president for research in 1971–1972. His work (along with fellow-MIT faculty member Dave Forney) on

quadrature amplitude modulation Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is the name of a family of digital modulation methods and a related family of analog modulation methods widely used in modern telecommunications to transmit information. It conveys two analog message signa ...

led to the 9600 bit/s modems that provided Codex's commercial success. He has also consulted for the MIT

Lincoln Laboratory The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and dev ...

and a number of other companies. He has been granted five

patents A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

on his inventions. In the mid-1970s, Gallager's research focus shifted to data networks, focusing on distributed algorithms, routing, congestion control, and random access techniques. In 1978, he showed, with graduate student Roger Camrass, that

packet switching In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping Data (computing), data into short messages in fixed format, i.e. ''network packet, packets,'' that are transmitted over a digital Telecommunications network, network. Packets consi ...

was optimal in the

Huffman coding In computer science and information theory, a Huffman code is a particular type of optimal prefix code that is commonly used for lossless data compression. The process of finding or using such a code is Huffman coding, an algorithm developed by ...

sense. He published a book ''Data Networks'' in 1988, with a second edition 1992, co-authored with Dimitri Bertsekas, which helped provide a conceptual foundation for this field. In the 1990s, Gallager's interests shifted back to information theory and to

stochastic processes In probability theory and related fields, a stochastic () or random process is a mathematical object usually defined as a family of random variables in a probability space, where the index of the family often has the interpretation of time. Stoc ...

. He wrote the 1996 textbook, ''Discrete Stochastic Processes''. Gallager's current interests are in information theory, wireless communication, all optical networks, data networks, and stochastic processes. Over the years, Gallager has taught and mentored many graduate students, many of whom are now themselves leading researchers in their fields. He received the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching Award for 1993. In 1999 he received the

Harvey Prize The Harvey Prize is an annual Israeli award for breakthroughs in science and technology, as well as contributions to peace in the Middle East granted by the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Technion in Haifa. The prize has become a ...

from the American Society for the

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is a public university, public research university located in Haifa, Israel. Established in 1912 by Jews under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, the Technion is the oldest university in the coun ...

. In 2020 he was awarded the

Japan Prize is awarded to individuals whose original and outstanding achievements in science and technology are recognized as having advanced the frontiers of knowledge and served the cause of peace and prosperity for mankind. As of 2024, the Japan Prize h ...

.Japan Prize 2020
/ref> Gallager's textbook, ''Principles of Digital Communication'' was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Gallager was President of the

in 1971, a member of its board of governors from 1965 to 1972 and again from 1979 to 1988. He served the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory as associate editor for coding 1963–1964 and as associate editor for computer communications from 1977 to 1980. He was chairman of the advisory committee to the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

Division on Networking and Communication Research and Infrastructure from 1989 to 1992, and has been on numerous visiting committees for electrical engineering and computer science departments.

Personal life

Gallager has 3 children, 4 stepchildren, 7 grandchildren, 10 step grandchildren and 3 great step children. He is married to Marie Gallager.

References

External links

*
Biography
from the IEEE History Center.
Marconi Fellow biography
*
Home page
at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

.
Publications
from

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. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Gallager, Robert Gray American electrical engineers American information theorists 1931 births Living people Researchers in distributed computing IEEE Medal of Honor recipients Dijkstra Prize laureates Scientists at Bell Labs Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences MIT School of Engineering faculty MIT School of Engineering alumni University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni 20th-century American engineers 21st-century American engineers IEEE Centennial Medal laureates Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the IEEE