Vladimir Levenshtein

Vladimir Iosifovich Levenshtein (Russian: Влади́мир Ио́сифович Левенште́йн; IPA: [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɪˈosʲɪfəvʲɪtɕ lʲɪvʲɪnˈʂtʲejn]; born 1935) is a Russian scientist who has done research in information theory, error-correcting codes, and combinatorial design. Among other contributions, he is known for the Levenshtein distance and a Levenshtein algorithm, which he developed in 1965.

He graduated from the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow State University in 1958 and has worked at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow ever since. He is a fellow of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

He received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2006, for “contributions to the theory of error-correcting codes and information theory, including the Levenshtein distance”.^[1]

There is a controversy in regard to the publication date of the paper where the Levenshtein distance was introduced. The original, Russian, version was published in 1965,^[2] but the translation appeared in 1966.^[3][4]

Publications

• Levenshtein, V. I. (1965), "Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals.", Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR 163 (4): 845–848 
• Delsarte, P.; Levenshtein, V. I. (1998), "Association schemes and coding theory", IEEE Transactions in Information Theory 44 (6): 2477–2504 

See also

• Association scheme
• Bose–Mesner algebra
• Levenshtein automaton
• Levenshtein coding
• Levenshtein distance

References

External links

• Levenstein's personal webpage - in Russian
• March 2003 pictures of Levenshtein at a professional reception.
• Another (better) picture from the same source
• Web page including picture referring to his 2006 Hamming Medal award