Chris Wallace (computer scientist)

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Professor Christopher Stewart Wallace (26 October 1933—7 August 2004) was an Australian computer scientist (and physicist, etc.) notable for having devised:

• The minimum message length principle (Wallace and Boulton, 1968, WB1968) - an information-theoretic principle in statistics, econometrics and machine learning which can be seen both as a mathematical formalisation of Occam's Razor and as an invariant Bayesian method of model selection and point estimation.
• The Wallace tree multiplier (see multiplication ALU).

He was appointed Foundation Chair of Computer Science at Monash University in 1968, and Professor Emeritus in 1996. Wallace was a fellow of the Australian Computer Society and in 1995 he was appointed a fellow of the ACM "For research in a number of areas in Computer Science including fast multiplication algorithm, minimum message length principle and its applications, random number generation, computer architecture, numerical solution of ODE's, and contribution to Australian Computer Science."[1]

Wallace received his PhD (in Physics) from the University of Sydney in 1959. He was married to Judy Ogilvie, the first operator of SILLIAC, one of Australia's first computers which was launched on the 12 of September 1956 at the university of Sydney [2]. He also engineered one of the world's first Local Area Networks in the mid 60's [3].

[edit] External links

• Christopher S. Wallace publications, and searchable publications database
• Wallace, C.S. (posthumous, 2005), Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length, Springer (Series: Information Science and Statistics), 2005, XVI, 432 pp., 22 illus., Hardcover, ISBN 0-387-23795-X. (Links to chapter headings, table of contents and sample pages.)