David S. Slepian (June 30, 1923 – November 29, 2007) was an American mathematician.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania he studied B.Sc. at University of Michigan before joining the forces in World War II, as Sonic deception officer in the Ghost army. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1949, for a dissertation in physics. After post-doctoral work at University of Cambridge and University of Sorbonne, he worked at the Mathematics Research Center at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he pioneered work in algebraic coding theory on group codes, first published in the paper A Class of Binary Signaling Alphabets. Here, he also worked along with other information theory giants as Claude Shannon and Richard Hamming. He also proved the possibility of singular detection, a perhaps unintuitive result. He is also known for Slepian's lemma in probability theory (1962), and for discovering a fundamental result in distributed source coding called Slepian-Wolf coding with Jack Keil Wolf (1973).
He later joined the University of Hawaii. His father was Joseph Slepian, also a scientist.[1] His wife is the noted children's author Jan Slepian.
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Richard R. Hough |
IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal 1981 |
Succeeded by Harold Rosen |