Rudolf F. Ahlswede (15 September 1938 – 18 December 2010) was a German
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 ...
. Born in
Dielmissen,
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
, he studied
mathematics,
physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
, and
philosophy. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1966, at the
University of Göttingen
The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...
, with the topic "Contributions to the
Shannon information theory in case of non-stationary channels". He dedicated himself in his further career to
information theory 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 University (german: Universität Bielefeld) is a university in Bielefeld, Germany. Founded in 1969, it is one of the country's newer universities, and considers itself a "reform" university, following a different style of organization a ...
, Bielefeld, Germany. In 1988, he received together with
Imre Csiszár
Imre Csiszár () is a Hungarian mathematician with contributions to information theory
and probability theory. In 1996 he won the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest annual
award given in the field of information theory.
He was born on Februa ...
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
Bielefeld University (german: Universität Bielefeld) is a university in Bielefeld, Germany. Founded in 1969, it is one of the country's newer universities, and considers itself a "reform" university, following a different style of organization ...
, Ahlswede received the 2006
Claude E. Shannon
Award
An award, sometimes called a distinction, is something given to a recipient as a token of recognition of excellence in a certain field. When the token is a medal, ribbon or other item designed for wearing, it is known as a decoration.
An awar ...
, 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
*
Information-theoretic security
A cryptosystem is considered to have information-theoretic security (also called unconditional security) if the system is secure against adversaries with unlimited computing resources and time. In contrast, a system which depends on the computatio ...
*
Linear network coding
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