Solomon W. Golomb
Encyclopedia
Solomon Wolf Golomb is an American mathematician and engineer and a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

, best known to the general public and fans of mathematical games as the inventor of polyomino
Polyomino
A polyomino is a plane geometric figure formed by joining one or more equal squares edge to edge. It is a polyform whose cells are squares. It may be regarded as a finite subset of the regular square tiling with a connected interior....

es, the inspiration for the computer game Tetris
Tetris
Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...

. He has specialized in problems of combinatorial analysis, number theory, coding theory and communications. Golomb invented Cheskers
Cheskers
Cheskers is a variant of checkers invented by Solomon Golomb in 1948.-Pieces:* Pawns move as pieces in checkers: they move, without taking, one square diagonally forward, but take by jumping two squares diagonally forward over an enemy piece to an empty square, thereby removing the enemy piece...

 and the pentomino
Pentomino
A pentomino is a polyomino composed of five congruent squares, connected along their edges ....

es in 1948 and 1953 respectively.

Academic achievements

Golomb ruler
Golomb ruler
In mathematics, a Golomb ruler is a set of marks at integer positions along an imaginary ruler such that no two pairs of marks are the same distance apart. The number of marks on the ruler is its order, and the largest distance between two of its marks is its length...

s, used in astronomy and in data encryption, are also named for him, as is one of the main generation techniques of Costas array
Costas array
In mathematics, a Costas array can be regarded geometrically as a set of n points lying on the squares of a n×n checkerboard, such that each row or column contains only one point, and that all of the n/2 displacement vectors between each pair of dots are distinct...

s.

Golomb, a graduate of the Baltimore City College
Baltimore City College
The Baltimore City College , also referred to as The Castle on the Hill, historically as The College, and most commonly City, is a public high school in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. The City College curriculum includes the International Baccalaureate Programme and emphasizes study in the classics...

 high school, received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 and an M.A. and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1957 with a dissertation on "Problems in the Distribution of the Prime Numbers".

While working at the Glenn L. Martin Company
Glenn L. Martin Company
The Glenn L. Martin Company was an American aircraft and aerospace manufacturing company that was founded by the aviation pioneer Glenn L. Martin. The Martin Company produced many important aircraft for the defense of the United States and its allies, especially during World War II and the Cold War...

 he became interested in communications theory and began his work on shift register sequences
Linear feedback shift register
A linear feedback shift register is a shift register whose input bit is a linear function of its previous state.The most commonly used linear function of single bits is XOR...

. He spent his Fulbright year at the University of Oslo
University of Oslo
The University of Oslo , formerly The Royal Frederick University , is the oldest and largest university in Norway, situated in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. The university was founded in 1811 and was modelled after the recently established University of Berlin...

 and then joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. The facility is headquartered in the city of Pasadena on the border of La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena...

 at Caltech, where he researched military and space communications. He joined the faculty of USC University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

 in 1963 and had tenure within two years following.

Golomb pioneered the identification of the characteristics and merits of maximum length shift register sequences
Maximum length sequence
A maximum length sequence is a type of pseudorandom binary sequence.They are bit sequences generated using maximal linear feedback shift registers and are so called because they are periodic and reproduce every binary sequence that can be reproduced by the shift registers...

, also known as pseudorandom
Pseudorandom number generator
A pseudorandom number generator , also known as a deterministic random bit generator , is an algorithm for generating a sequence of numbers that approximates the properties of random numbers...

 or pseudonoise sequences, which have extensive military, industrial and consumer applications. Today, millions of cordless and cellular phones employ pseudorandom direct-sequence spread spectrum
Direct-sequence spread spectrum
In telecommunications, direct-sequence spread spectrum is a modulation technique. As with other spread spectrum technologies, the transmitted signal takes up more bandwidth than the information signal that is being modulated. The name 'spread spectrum' comes from the fact that the carrier signals...

 implemented with shift register sequences. His efforts made USC a center for communications research.

Golomb was the inventor of Golomb coding
Golomb coding
Golomb coding is a lossless data compression method using a family of data compression codes invented by Solomon W. Golomb in the 1960s. Alphabets following a geometric distribution will have a Golomb code as an optimal prefix code, making Golomb coding highly suitable for situations in which the...

, a form of entropy encoding
Entropy encoding
In information theory an entropy encoding is a lossless data compression scheme that is independent of the specific characteristics of the medium....

.

He is a regular columnist, writing Golomb's Puzzle Column in IEEE Information Society Newsletter. He was a frequent contributor to Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...

s Mathematical Games column. Among his contributions to recreational mathematics are Rep-tiles. He also contributes a puzzle to each issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine, a monthly publication of his alma mater, for a column called "Golomb's Gambits."

Awards

In 1992, he received the medal of the U.S. National Security Agency
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...

 for his research, and has also been the recipient of the Lomonosov Medal of the Russian Academy of Science and the Kapitsa Medal of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences
Russian Academy of Natural Sciences
Russian Academy of Natural Sciences is a Russian public organization, an academy of sciences, founded on August 31, 1990 in Moscow....

.

In 2000 he was awarded the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for his exceptional contributions to information sciences and systems. He was singled out as a major figure of coding and information theory for over four decades, specifically for his ability to apply advanced mathematics to problems in digital communications.

Golomb was one of the first high profile professors to attempt the Ronald K. Hoeflin
Ronald K. Hoeflin
Ronald K. Hoeflin is a philosopher by trade, creator of the Mega and Titan intelligence tests. In 1988 Hoeflin won the American Philosophical Association's Rockefeller Prize for his article, "Theories of Truth: A Comprehensive Synthesis." His article argues for the interrelated nature of seven...

 Mega IQ power test, which originally appeared in Omni Magazine. He scored at least IQ 176, which represents of the unselected population.

Selected books

  • Signal Design for Good Correlation (ISBN 0-521-82104-5)
  • Polyominoes, Princeton University Press; 2nd edition 1996, ISBN 0-691-02444-8
  • Shift Register Sequences, San Francisco, Holden-Day, 1967. ISBN 0894120484

External links

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