Rudolf F. Ahlswede (15 September 1938 – 18 December 2010) was a German
mathematician. Born in
Dielmissen
Dielmissen is a municipality in the district of Holzminden, in Lower Saxony, Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russ ...
,
Germany, he studied
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
,
physics, and
philosophy
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...
. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1966, at the
University of Göttingen, with the topic "Contributions to the
Shannon information theory
Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. T ...
in case of non-stationary channels". He dedicated himself in his further career to
information theory
Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification (science), quantification, computer data storage, storage, and telecommunication, communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist a ...
and became one of the leading representatives of this area worldwide.
Life and work
In 1977, he joined and held a Professorship at the
University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany. In 1988, he received together with
Imre Csiszár the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society for work in the area of the hypothesis testing as well as in 1990 together with Gunter Dueck for a new theory of message identification. He has been awarded this prize twice. As an emeritus of
Bielefeld University, Ahlswede received the 2006
Claude E. Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".
As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institu ...
Award, one of the first few non-US citizens to receive it. Ahlswede's work began the field of
Network coding.
Rudolf Ahlswede died on 18 December 2010, at the age of 72.
Books
*R. Ahlswede and I. Wegener, Suchprobleme, Teubner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1979.
*R. Ahlswede and I. Wegener, Search Problems, English Edition of "Suchprobleme" with Supplement of recent Literature,
*R.L. Graham, J.K. Leenstra, and R.E. Tarjan (Eds.), Wiley-Interscience Series in Discrete Mathematics and Optimization, 1987.
*I. Althöfer, N. Cai, G. Dueck, L. Khachatrian, M.S. Pinsker, A. Sárkozy, I. Wegener and Z. Zhang (Eds.),Numbers, Information and Complexity, 50 articles in honour of Rudolf Ahlswede, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 2000.
**http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/ahlswede/books/kluwer.html
*R. Ahlswede, L. Bäumer, N. Cai, H. Aydinian, V. Blinovsky, C. Deppe, and H. Mashurian (Eds.), General Theory of Information Transfer and Combinatorics, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Vol. 4123, 2006.
**http://www.springer.com/computer/foundations/book/978-3-540-46244-6
*
*R. Ahlswede and V. Blinovsky, Lectures on Advances in Combinatorics, Universitext, Springer-Verlag, 2008.
**http://www.springer.com/math/numbers/book/978-3-540-78601-6
See also
*
Ahlswede–Daykin inequality
The Ahlswede–Daykin inequality , also known as the four functions theorem (or inequality),
is a correlation-type inequality for four functions on a finite distributive lattice. It is a fundamental tool in statistical mechanics and probabilisti ...
*
Information-theoretic security
*
Linear network coding In computer networking, linear network coding is a program in which intermediate nodes transmit data from source nodes to sink nodes by means of linear combinations.
Linear network coding may be used to improve a network's throughput, efficiency, ...
References
Sources
*http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/ahlswede/
*http://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/ahlswede/homepage/
*http://media.itsoc.org/isit2006/ahlswede/
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ahlswede, Rudolf
1938 births
2010 deaths
German information theorists
20th-century German mathematicians