Solomon W. Golomb

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Solomon W. Golomb

Solomon Wolf Golomb (b. 1932 in Baltimore, Maryland) is a mathematician and engineer, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California best known to the general public and fans of mathematical games as the inventor of polyominoes, the inspiration for the computer game Tetris. He has specialized in problems of combinatorial analysis, number theory, coding theory and communications.

Golomb rulers, used in astronomy and in data encryption, are also named for him.

Golomb received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1957 with a dissertation on "Problems in the Distribution of the Prime Numbers".

While working at the Glenn L. Martin Co. he became interested in communications theory and began his work on shift register sequences. He spent his Fulbright year at the University of Oslo and then joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, where he researched military and space communications. He became a faculty member of the University of Southern California in 1963, becoming a full professor in 1991.

Golomb pioneered the identification of the characteristics and merits of maximum length shift register sequences, also known as pseudorandom or pseudonoise sequences, which have extensive military, industrial and consumer applications. Today, millions of cordless and cellular phones employ pseudorandom direct-sequence spread spectrum implemented with shift register sequences. His efforts made USC a center for communications research.

Golomb was the inventor of Golomb coding, a form of entropy encoding.

He is a regular columnist, writing Golomb's Puzzle Column in IEEE Information Society Newsletter. He was a frequent contributor to Scientific American's Mathematical Games column. Among his contributions to recreational mathematics are Rep-tiles.

In 1992, he received the medal of the U.S. National Security Agency for his research, and has also been the recipient of the Lomonosov Medal of the Russian Academy of Science and the Kapitsa Medal of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.

In 2000 he was awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Richard W. Hamming Medal for his exceptional contributions to information sciences and systems. He was singled out as a major figure of coding and information theory for over four decades, specifically for his ability to apply advanced mathematics to problems in digital communications.

[edit] Trivia

Golomb was one of the first high profile professors to attempt the Ronald K. Hoeflin Mega IQ power test, which originally appeared in Omni Magazine. He scored at least IQ 164, which represents 1/30,000 of the unselected population.[1]