I used to bump into Professor Fano in the halls. I recall he made an observation to the effect, "Americans are very generous unless they think they are being played for a sucker, in which case they become very mean spirited." I thought (and still think) that was very insightful. It explains a lot of politics. On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 11:46 PM Lawrence Stewart wrote: > Fano was an information theorist of some note. He’s known for his role in > the Shannon-Fano algorithm for data compression (very similar to Huffman > coding) and for the “Fano Algorithm” for decoding convolutional error > correcting codes. > > In the old days of limited computation, the Fano algorithm was a > reasonable choice, but in these modern days everyone uses the Viterbi > Algorithm instead, which requires more computation and state, but is > guaranteed to give the best answer. > > -Larry > > I think Fano falls into the “Research Laboratory of Electronics” group of > MIT folks who do communications engineering, rather than the “CSAIL” group > of computer scientists. Of course there is a fair amount of crossover, > such as Dina Katabi. > > > > On 2019, Jul 12, at 9:12 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > > > > We lost him in 2016, and he used to work at MIT; unfortunately that's > all the details that I have for him (apart from being born 11/11/17). > > > > -- Dave > > _______________________________________________ > > COFF mailing list > > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: