Alexander Vardy (12 November 1963 - 11 March 2022) was a Russian-born and Israeli-educated electrical engineer known for his expertise in coding theory.[1] He held the Jack Keil Wolf Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.[2] The Parvaresh–Vardy codes are named after him.[3]

Vardy was born in Moscow in 1963.[1][4] He graduated from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1985,[4] and completed his Ph.D. in 1991 at Tel Aviv University.[1][5] During his graduate studies, he also worked on electronic countermeasures for the Israeli Air Force, attaining the rank of Seren (Captain).[4] He became a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center for two years, then became a faculty member of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign before moving to UCSD in 1996.[1][4] He served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 1998 to 2001.[1][6]

In 2004 a paper by Ralf Koetter and Vardy on decoding Reed–Solomon codes was listed by the IEEE Information Theory Society as the best paper in information theory of the previous two years; the resulting decoding algorithm has become known as the Koetter–Vardy algorithm.[1] Vardy was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1999.[2][7] He became the Jack Wolf Professor in 2013.[2] He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2017.[8]

Vardy died on March 11, 2022, at the age of 58.[9]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 UC San Diego Scientist Wins Award from IEEE Information Theory Society for Breakthrough in Coding Theory, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, November 9, 2004.
  2. 1 2 3 Alex Vardy Named First Jack Keil Wolf Chair in Electrical Engineering, University of California, San Diego, May 15, 2013.
  3. ↑ Guruswami, Venkatesan; Umans, Christopher; Vadhan, Salil (2009), "Unbalanced expanders and randomness extractors from Parvaresh-Vardy codes" (PDF), Journal of the ACM, 56 (4): Art. 20, 34, doi:10.1145/1538902.1538904, MR 2590822, S2CID 220974105.
  4. 1 2 3 4 IEEE Information Theory Society member profile, retrieved 2015-08-09.
  5. ↑ Alexander Vardy at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. ↑ Past editors of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, University of Toronto, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, archived from the original on 2015-09-23, retrieved 2015-08-09.
  7. ↑ IEEE Fellows Directory, retrieved 2015-08-09.
  8. ↑ ACM Recognizes 2017 Fellows for Making Transformative Contributions and Advancing Technology in the Digital Age, Association for Computing Machinery, December 11, 2017, retrieved 2017-11-13
  9. ↑ Senger, Christian (March 19, 2022), Alexander Vardy, distinguished coding theorist, passed away, IEEE Information Theory Society
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