In Memory of Jack Keil Wolf, Prominent Information Theorist at UC San Diego

Jack Keil Wolf, a pioneer in information theory and its applications, died in La Jolla, California on May 12, 2011. A member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, Wolf made profound contributions to digital communication and data storage technology. He served as a UC San Diego professor since 1984.

 

Jack Keil Wolf, a pioneer in information theory and its applications, died in La Jolla, California on May 12 at the age of 76, following a battle with cancer. A member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, Wolf made profound contributions to digital communication and data storage technology. Wolf served as a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego since 1984.

“When you save data on a hard disk, the magnetic medium is imperfect. Jack’s innovations have allowed us to write and read data from these magnetic devices with near perfect fidelity. This is at the heart of the information revolution,” said Lawrence Larson, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Jack was one of the deepest thinkers in terms of how you take information – ones and zeros – and make it so it can be stored or transmitted without losing its fidelity,” said Larson.

“It’s hard to overstate Jack’s role in getting the information theory community interested in data storage,” said Paul Siegel, Director of UCSD’s Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR) and an electrical engineering professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

In the 1980s, Wolf was instrumental in bringing a technique known as maximum likelihood detection to the field of data storage.  Essentially every hard disk drive, tape drive, and DVD player made in the last 20 years uses some form of this technology. Read the full story on the Jacobs School of Engineering news site: Jack Keil Wolf, Prominent Information Theorist at UC San Diego, Dies

Photo caption: An early hard disk drive. Courtesy of the UC San Diego Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR).