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Jacob Wolfowitz | |
|---|---|
 Wolfowitz in 1970 (photo courtesy of MFO) | |
| Born | (1910-03-19)March 19, 1910 Warsaw,Congress Poland, Russian Empire |
| Died | July 16, 1981(1981-07-16) (aged 71) Tampa, Florida, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | City University of New York New York University |
| Known for | Wald–Wolfowitz runs test Dvoretzky–Kiefer–Wolfowitz inequality |
| Spouse | Lillian Dundes |
| Children | Paul Wolfowitz |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Statistics |
| Institutions | Cornell University Columbia University University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University of South Florida |
| Doctoral advisor | Donald Flanders |
| Doctoral students | Albert H. Bowker Jack Kiefer Gottfried E. Noether Howard Levene Samuel Kotz |
Jacob Wolfowitz (March 19, 1910 – July 16, 1981) was a Polish-bornAmerican Jewishstatistician andShannon Award-winninginformation theorist. He was the father of formerUnited States Deputy Secretary of Defense andWorld Bank Group PresidentPaul Wolfowitz.
Wolfowitz was born in 1910 inWarsaw, Poland, the son of Helen (Pearlman) and Samuel Wolfowitz.[1] He emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1920. He received a bachelor of science in 1931 from theCity College of New York.
In the mid-1930s, Wolfowitz began his career as a high school mathematics teacher and continued teaching until 1942 when he received his Ph.D. degree inmathematics fromNew York University. While a part-time graduate student, Wolfowitz metAbraham Wald, with whom he collaborated in numerous joint papers in the field ofmathematical statistics. This collaboration continued until Wald's death in an airplane crash in 1950. In 1951, Wolfowitz became aprofessor of mathematics atCornell University, where he stayed until 1970. From 1970 to 1978 he was at theUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He died of aheart attack inTampa, Florida, where he had become a professor at theUniversity of South Florida after retiring from Illinois.
Wolfowitz's main contributions were in the fields ofstatistical decision theory,non-parametric statistics,sequential analysis, andinformation theory.
One of his results is the strong converse toClaude Shannon'scoding theorem. While Shannon could prove only that theblock error probability can not become arbitrarily small if the transmission rate is above the channel capacity, Wolfowitz proved that the block error rate actually converges to one. As a consequence, Shannon's original result is today termed "the weak theorem" (sometimes also Shannon's "conjecture" by some authors).
