Jack Wolf, 2001 Shannon Award Winner, Dies at 76
On May 12th, 2011, the information theory community lost one of its prominent members. Jack K. Wolf, Stephen O. Rice Professor of Magnetics at UCSD, passed away at the age of 76 in La Jolla.
May 25, 2011
Jack_Portrait
Jack Wolf was born in Newark on March 14, 1935. He earned his Bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1956 and the Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1960. He taught at New York University from 1963 to 1965, at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn from 1965 to 1973, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1973 to 1984 before moving to UCSD. At UCSD, he was a member of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research, working on information-theoretic and signal processing aspects of high-density magnetic recording systems.

Dr. Wolf was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1993 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1998 IEEE's Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communication Award, the Information Theory Society 2001 Shannon award, and the 2004 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. He is the co-recipient (with Irwin Jacobs) of the 2011 Marconi Society Prize. During his career he made numerous contributions in the fields of information theory and storage of digital data. He is perhaps best known for proving, together with David Slepian, the lossless source coding theorem for correlated sources. This work was awarded the 1975 IEEE Information Theory Group paper award.

Jack Wolf is survived by his wife, his two daughters, his two sons, and five grandchildren. 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/technology/21wolf.html?_r=1

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