David MacKay | |
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| Born | David John Cameron MacKay (1967-04-22)22 April 1967[4][6] Stoke-on-Trent, England |
| Died | 14 April 2016(2016-04-14) (aged 48) Cambridge, England |
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| Spouse | [10] |
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| Thesis | Bayesian methods for adaptive models (1992) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Hopfield[5] |
| Website | withouthotair www gov |
Sir David John Cameron MacKay (22 April 1967 – 14 April 2016)[4][11] was a Britishphysicist,mathematician, and academic. He was theRegius Professor of Engineering[12] in theDepartment of Engineering at theUniversity of Cambridge[13] and from 2009 to 2014 was Chief Scientific Advisor to the UKDepartment of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).[14] MacKay wrote the bookSustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air.[7][15][16]
MacKay was educated atNewcastle High School and represented Britain in theInternational Physics Olympiad in Yugoslavia in 1985,[17] receiving the first prize for experimental work. He continued his education atTrinity College, Cambridge, and received aBachelor of Arts degree inNatural Sciences (Experimental andtheoretical physics) in 1988.[4] He went to theCalifornia Institute of Technology (Caltech) as aFulbright Scholar, where his supervisor wasJohn Hopfield.[5] He was awarded a PhD in 1992.[18][19][3]
In January 1992 MacKay was appointed theRoyal Society Smithson Research Fellow atDarwin College, Cambridge, continuing his cross-disciplinary research in theCavendish Laboratory, the Department of Physics of the University of Cambridge. In 1995 he was made a University Lecturer in the Cavendish Laboratory. He was promoted in 1999 to a Readership, in 2003 to a Professorship inNatural Philosophy and in 2013 to the post ofRegius Professorship of Engineering.[20]
MacKay's contributions[21][22][23][24] inmachine learning andinformation theory include the development ofBayesian methods[25] forneural networks,[26] the rediscovery (withRadford M. Neal) oflow-density parity-check codes,[8] and the invention ofDasher,[9] a software application for communication especially popular with those who cannot use a traditional keyboard.[27] He cofounded the knowledge management companyTransversal.[28] In 2003, his bookInformation Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms[29] was published.
His interests beyond research included the development of effective teaching methods and African development; he taught regularly at theAfrican Institute for Mathematical Sciences inCape Town from its foundation in 2003 to 2006. In 2008 he completed a book on energy consumption and energy production withoutfossil fuels calledSustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air. MacKay used £10,000 of his own money to publish the book, and the initial print run of 5,000 sold within days.[30] The book received praise fromThe Economist,[31]The Guardian,[30] andBill Gates, who called it "one of the best books on energy that has been written."[32][33] Like his textbook on Information theory, MacKay made the book available for free online.[34] In March 2012 he gave aTED talk onrenewable energy.[35]
MacKay was appointed to be Chief Scientific Advisor of theDepartment of Energy and Climate Change, United Kingdom, in September 2009.[14] In October 2014, at the end of his five-year term, he was succeeded byJohn Loughhead.[36]
MacKay was elected aFellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009.[1] His certificate of election reads:
David MacKay introduced more efficient types oferror-correcting code that are now used in satellite communications, digital broadcasting and magnetic recording. He advanced the field of Machine Learning by providing a sound Bayesian foundation forartificial neural networks. Using this foundation, he significantly improved their performance, allowing them to be used for designing new types of steel that are now used in power stations. He used his expertise in information theory to design a widely used interface called "dasher" that allows disabled people to write efficiently using a single finger or head-mounted pointer."[2]
In the2016 New Year Honours, MacKay was appointed aKnight Bachelor "for services to scientific advice in government and science outreach".[37][38]
David MacKay was born the fifth child ofDonald MacCrimmon MacKay and Valerie MacKay.[4] His elder brotherRobert S. MacKay FRS (born in 1956) is Professor of Mathematics at theUniversity of Warwick. David was a vegetarian.[39]
He married Ramesh Ghiassi in 2011.[4] They had a son and a daughter.[11]
MacKay was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer (malignantadenocarcinoma) in July 2015,[3] for which he underwent palliative chemotherapy, a process he documented in detail on his public personal blog.[40][41] He died in the afternoon of 14 April 2016.[42][43][44][45] He is survived by his wife and two children.[11]
“All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available underCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved9 March 2016.
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