Robert Fano

Robert Fano
Prof. Fano in his office at MIT in 2012
Born
Roberto Mario Fano

(1917-11-11)11 November 1917
Turin, Italy
Died13 July 2016(2016-07-13) (aged 98)
Naples, Florida, U.S.
CitizenshipUnited States of America
Alma materMIT
Known forShannon-Fano coding, founder of Project MAC
AwardsIEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal (1977)
Shannon Award (1976)
IEEE Fellow (1954)
Scientific career
Fieldscomputer science, information theory
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology
ThesisTheoretical Limitations on the Broadband Matching of Arbitrary Impedances (1947)
Doctoral advisorErnst Guillemin

Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano (11 November 1917 – 13 July 2016) was an Italian-American computer scientist. He was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] He was born in Turin, Italy.

He was known principally for his work on information theory, inventing (with Claude Shannon) Shannon–Fano coding[2] and deriving the Fano inequality. He also invented the Fano algorithm and postulated the Fano metric.[3]

Fano died on 13 July 2016 at the age of 98.[4]

References

  1. ↑ Markoff, John (13 March 2008). "Joseph Weizenbaum Dies; Computer Pioneer Was 85". The New York Times. p. 22. Retrieved 15 August 2011.
  2. ↑ Salomon, David (2007). Data compression: the complete reference. Springer. pp. 72–. ISBN 978-1-84628-602-5. Retrieved 15 August 2011.
  3. ↑ Fano, Robert M. (April 1963). "A heuristic discussion of probabilistic decoding". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 9 (2): 64–73. doi:10.1109/tit.1963.1057827.
  4. ↑ Conner-Simons, Adam; Gordon, Rachel (15 July 2016). "Robert Fano, computing pioneer and founder of CSAIL, dies at 98". MIT News Office. Archived from the original on 16 July 2016. Retrieved 15 July 2016.