Andrew Viterbi
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Andrew James Viterbi, Ph.D. (born March 9, 1935) is an Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman.
Andrew Viterbi was born in Bergamo, Italy to Jewish parents and emigrated with them in 1939 to the United States as a refugee. His original name was Andrea, but when he was naturalized in the US, his parents changed it to Andrew, since Andrea is a female name in many English-speaking countries. Viterbi attended the Boston Latin School, and then entered MIT in 1952, studying electrical engineering. Distinguished faculty members contemporary to his education included Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Robert Fano and Bruno Rossi. After receiving both his S.B. and his S.M. in Electrical Engineering in 1957 from MIT, Viterbi received his Ph.D. in digital communications from the University of Southern California.
Viterbi was later a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and UCSD. He is the inventor of the Viterbi algorithm, which he used for decoding convolutionally encoded data. It is still used widely in error correcting codes present in cellular phones, as well as in speech recognition systems and other applications of Hidden Markov models.
Viterbi was the cofounder of Linkabit Corporation, with Irwin Jacobs in 1968, a small military contractor. He was also the founder of Qualcomm Inc. in 1985. As of 2003, he is the president of the venture capital company The Viterbi Group. In 2000, Viterbi ranked 386th on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, with an estimated worth of $640 million.
In 2002, Viterbi dedicated the Andrew Viterbi '52 Computer Center at his alma mater, Boston Latin School. On March 2, 2004, the University of Southern California School of Engineering was renamed to the Viterbi School of Engineering in his honor, following his $52 million donation to the school.
Viterbi is married to Erna Finci, with whom he has three children.
[edit] External links
- Interview with the IEEE History Center.
- Interview in html.
- The Quiet Genius, Trudi E. Bell (PDF)
Categories: 1935 births | Living people | American computer scientists | American philanthropists | Computer pioneers | Italian-Americans | American businesspeople | Italian Jews | Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni | Natives of Bergamo | University of Southern California alumni | Members and associates of the US National Academy of Sciences | Boston Latin School alumni
