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

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

communications network A telecommunications network is a group of nodes interconnected by telecommunications links that are used to exchange messages between the nodes. The links may use a variety of technologies based on the methodologies of circuit switching, message ...

s. Gallager was elected a member of the

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

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

IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...

in 1968, a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, 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 Nati ...

(NAS) in 1992, and a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) 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 ...

(AAAS) in 1999. He received the

Claude E. 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 ...

from the

IEEE Information Theory Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

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 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It has been awarded since 1917, when its first recipient was Major Edwin H. Armstrong. It is given for an exceptional contribution ...

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 a ...

in 2003, and a

Dijkstra Prize The Edsger W. Dijkstra Paper Prize in Distributed Computing is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at lea ...

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 which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

and

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

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

Biography

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

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

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

Bell Telephone Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mul ...

in 1953–1954 and then served in the

U.S. Signal Corps ) , colors = Orange and white , colors_label = Corps colors , march = , mascot = , equipment = , equipment_label = ...

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'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

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 land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, in 1965 and a visiting professor at the

École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région ...

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

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

low-density parity-check code In information theory, a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code is a linear error correcting code, a method of transmitting a message over a noisy transmission channel. An LDPC code is constructed using a sparse Tanner graph (subclass of the bipa ...

s, was published by the

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

as a

monograph A monograph is a specialist work of writing (in contrast to reference works) or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject. In library cataloging, ''monograph ...

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.Contributors, ''IEEE Transactions on Information Theory'' 42, #3 (May 1996), p. 1048. DO10.1 ...

. This paper won an IEEE Information Theory Society Golden-Jubilee Paper Award in 1998 and its subject matter is a very active area of research today. Gallager's January 1965 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, "A Simple Derivation of the Coding Theorem and some Applications", won the 1966

IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award provided by the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), was created in 1956 from a donation from Walter R. G. Baker (1892–1960) to the IRE. The award continued to be awarded by the board of directors of the Institute of Ele ...

"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 Melpar was an American government contractor in the 20th century Cold War period. At a time when most employment in Washington, DC was directly by the US federal government, Melpar became an early private sector contracting company training a hig ...

as a graduate student, and for

Codex Corporation Vanguard Managed Solutions (VanguardMS) was a limited liability company (LLC) which specialized in monitoring live data networks from network operations centers (NOCs) from 2001 to 2007. It began as Codex Corporation then was a division of Motoro ...

when since 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 George David Forney Jr. (born March 6, 1940) is an American electrical engineer who made contributions in telecommunication system theory, specifically in coding theory and information theory. Biography Forney received the B.S.E. degree in elect ...

) 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 signal ...

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 enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

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. ''Data Networks'', Prentice Hall, published in 1988, with second edition 1992, co-authored with

Dimitri Bertsekas Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas (born 1942, Athens, el, Δημήτρης Παντελής Μπερτσεκάς) is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering ...

, 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. Stochastic processes are widely used as mathematical models of systems and phenomena that appe ...

. 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 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 in Haifa. History The prize is named for industrialist and inventor Leo Harvey. T ...

from the American Society for the

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology ( he, הטכניון – מכון טכנולוגי לישראל) is a public research university located in Haifa, Israel. Established in 1912 under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, the Technion ...

. In 2020 he was awarded the

Japan Prize is awarded to people from all parts of the world 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." The P ...

.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 National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

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

Mathematics Genealogy Project data

Home page
at

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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 Fellow Members of the IEEE