Professor Sir David John Cameron MacKay (22 April 1967 – 14 April 2016) was a British

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

, and academic. He was the Regius Professor of Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

and from 2009 to 2014 was Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK

Department of Energy and Climate Change The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was a department of the Government of the United Kingdom created on 3 October 2008, by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to take over some of the functions related to energy of the Department for Busin ...

(DECC). MacKay wrote the book ''Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air''.

Education

MacKay was educated at Newcastle High School and represented Britain in the

International Physics Olympiad The International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) is an annual physics competition for high school students. It is one of the International Science Olympiads. The first IPhO was held in Warsaw, Poland in 1967. Each national delegation is made up of at ...

in Yugoslavia in 1985, receiving the first prize for experimental work. He continued his education at

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

, and received a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four year ...

degree in

Natural Sciences Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeatab ...

(Experimental and

theoretical physics Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experim ...

) in 1988. He went to the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

(Caltech) as a Fulbright Scholar, where his supervisor was

John Hopfield John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network. Biography Hopfield was born in 1933 to Po ...

. He was awarded a PhD in 1992.

Career and research

In January 1992 MacKay was appointed the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

Smithson Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, continuing his cross-disciplinary research in the Cavendish Laboratory, the Department of Physics of the University of Cambridge. In 1995 he was made a University Lecturer in the Cavendish Laboratory. He was promoted in 1999 to a Readership, in 2003 to a Professorship in

Natural Philosophy Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin ''philosophia naturalis'') is the philosophical study of physics, that is, nature and the physical universe. It was dominant before the development of modern science. From the ancient wo ...

and in 2013 to the post of Regius Professorship of Engineering. MacKay's contributions in

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and information theory include the development of

Bayesian method Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference is an important technique in statistics, and e ...

s for neural networks, the rediscovery (with Radford M. Neal) of low-density parity-check codes, and the invention of '' Dasher'', a software application for communication especially popular with those who cannot use a traditional keyboard. He cofounded the knowledge management company Transversal. In 2003, his book ''Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms'' was published. His interests beyond research included the development of effective teaching methods and African development; he taught regularly at the

African Institute for Mathematical Sciences The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a tertiary education and research institute in Muizenberg, South Africa, established in September 2003, and an associated network of linked institutes in Senegal, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzan ...

Cape Town Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest ...

from its foundation in 2003 to 2006. In 2008 he completed a book on energy consumption and energy production without fossil fuels called ''Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air''. MacKay used £10,000 of his own money to publish the book, and the initial print run of 5,000 sold within days. The book received praise from ''

The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Eco ...

'', ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', and

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

, who called it "one of the best books on energy that has been written." Like his textbook on Information theory, MacKay made the book available for free online. In March 2012 he gave a

TED talk TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded by Richard Sau ...

on renewable energy. MacKay was appointed to be Chief Scientific Advisor of the

, United Kingdom, in September 2009. In October 2014, at the end of his five-year term, he was succeeded by

John Loughhead Prof John Neil Loughhead CB OBE FREng FIMechE FIET (born 24 September 1948) is a British businessman and Chief Scientific Adviser to Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). He is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy o ...

.DECC appoints new chief scientific advisor
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Awards and honours

MacKay was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: His certificate of election reads: In the

2016 New Year Honours The New Year Honours 2016 were appointments by some of the 16 Commonwealth realms to various orders and honours to recognise and reward good works by citizens of those countries. The New Year Honours are awarded as part of the New Year celebratio ...

, MacKay was appointed a

Knight Bachelor The title of Knight Bachelor is the basic rank granted to a man who has been knighted by the monarch but not inducted as a member of one of the organised orders of chivalry; it is a part of the British honours system. Knights Bachelor are th ...

"for services to Scientific Advice in Government and Science Outreach", and therefore granted the

title A title is one or more words used before or after a person's name, in certain contexts. It may signify either generation, an official position, or a professional or academic qualification. In some languages, titles may be inserted between the f ...

sir ''Sir'' is a formal honorific address in English for men, derived from Sire in the High Middle Ages. Both are derived from the old French "Sieur" (Lord), brought to England by the French-speaking Normans, and which now exist in French only as ...

''.

Personal life

David MacKay was born the fifth child of

Donald MacCrimmon MacKay Donald MacCrimmon MacKay (9 August 1922 – 6 February 1987) was a British physicist, and professor at the Department of Communication and Neuroscience at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, known for his contributions to information theo ...

and Valerie MacKay. His elder brother Robert S. MacKay FRS (born in 1956) is Professor of Mathematics at the

University of Warwick , mottoeng = Mind moves matter , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £7.0 million (2021) , budget = £698.2 million (2020� ...

. David was a vegetarian. He married Ramesh Ghiassi in 2011. They had a son and a daughter.

Illness and death

MacKay was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer (malignant adenocarcinoma) in July 2015, for which he underwent palliative chemotherapy, a process he documented in detail on his public personal blog. He died in the afternoon of 14 April 2016. He is survived by his wife and two children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mackay, David J. C. 1967 births 2016 deaths British physicists British information theorists Natural philosophers Professors of engineering (Cambridge) Fellows of Darwin College, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Society Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge People from Stoke-on-Trent British non-fiction writers People educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme School Fellows of the Institute of Physics California Institute of Technology alumni British male writers Knights Bachelor Male non-fiction writers Regius Professors Fulbright alumni