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Memorial Day, Solomon Golomb
May 30, 2016
Today, Monday, May 30, 2016, is
Memorial Day in the
United States. This
holiday is observed on the last Monday in May of each year, and it's the
traditional start of the
summer vacation period. While originally conceived as a day to honor war dead, it's a day in which people remember their departed friends and family members, sometimes visiting
grave sites to place
flowers.
Military veteran's graves are typically marked by a small
American flag.
Cemetery at the National Shrine of the North American Martyrs, Auriesville, New York. (Photo by the author, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Click for larger image)
May 1, 2016, marked the death at age 83 of the prominent
American mathematician,
Solomon Wolf Golomb (May 30, 1932 – May 1, 2016). Golomb, who was the
son and
grandson of
rabbis from
Vilnius, Lithuania, was awarded his
B.S. degree in
mathematics from
Johns Hopkins University at age eighteen.[1] His mathematical specialty was
number theory, writing a
doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in 1957 on the distribution of the
prime numbers.
Golomb worked on
communication theory at a
summer job at the
Glenn L. Martin Company, which sparked his interest in
shift register sequences and steered him away from
pure to
applied mathematics.[1] After a
Fulbright sabbatical at the
University of Oslo, Golomb joined
Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he worked further on communications. Although recruited by
UCLA, Golomb became a
professor of
electrical engineering in 1963 at the
University of Southern California, where he was a Distinguished University Professor at his death.[1]
Solomon Wolf Golomb (left) in 1961 when he was assistant chief of the Communications Systems Research Section of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is shown with colleague mathematicians, Leonard Baumert and Marshall Hall, Jr., holding a representation of a Hadamard matrix of 92 rows and columns. The existence of this matrix, with utility in constructing communication code, was discovered by the team using an IBM 7090 mainframe computer, programmed by Baumert. (NASA/JPL image.)
Golomb investigated
maximal length shift registers that serve as
pseudorandom number generators important to many computer applications, such as
numerical simulation and cryptography. He also invented
Golomb coding, a
lossless compression method. His advances in communications coding techniques allowed the
compression needed to relay
signals from the Mars
Spirit and
Opportunity rovers and to recover
radar signals bounced from the surface of
Venus in 1961.[1]
My favorite among Golomb's many mathematical constructions is the
Golomb ruler, an
integer-marked
ruler that has no two pairs of marks the same distance apart. A moment's reflection will reveal that such a ruler can give accurate measures of many different lengths by
translation. Some Golomb rulers, called perfect Golomb rulers, can measure all integer distances up to their
length. This is only true for Golomb rulers of length four, or less. The web site,
distributed.net, hosts a
massively parallel search effort for long Golomb rulers.
A Golomb ruler of order 16 and length 177. This ruler, discovered by James B. Shearer in 1986, has divisions at 0, 1, 4, 11, 26, 32, 56, 68, 76, 115, 117, 134, 150, 163, 168, and 177. (Created using Inkscape. Click for larger image.)
Golomb's
intellectual prowess extended into many areas, He spoke several
languages, invented a
hybrid of
chess and
checkers in 1948 called "
cheskers," and his variant of
dominoes, called
pentomino, is said to have inspired
Tetris.[1] Golomb wrote many
recreational mathematics articles. He was a regular
columnist of the
IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter, writing "Golomb's Puzzle Column;" author of a
puzzle for each issue of the
Johns Hopkins Magazine in a column called "Golomb's Gambits;" contributor to
Scientific American's Mathematical Games column; and a contributor to
Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.
Among his
honors and awards is his appointment to the
Viterbi Chair in Communications at USC in 1999.[1] The chair is named after another communications pioneer,
Andrew Viterbi,
Qualcomm co-founder, who met Golomb at JPL.[1] Golomb was awarded the 2016
Franklin Institute Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering, and he was one of only twelve recipients of the 2013
National Medal of Science.[1]
Golomb was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering in 1976; additionally, he was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences in 2003. He was a
fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
American Mathematical Society, the
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.[1] He was recipient of the 2000
IEEE Richard W. Hamming Gold Medal, the
Lomonosov Medal of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, the
Kapitsa Medal of the
Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and a medal from the
US National Security agency.
Said Andre Viterbi at Golomb's death, "We've lost a great mind. A great heart and a great sense of
humor. The
universe will miss him as much as we will."[1] USC President,
C. L. Max Nikias, stated that
"Professor Golomb was truly a giant in the field of mathematics and engineering... He was an exceptionally imaginative thinker, and so many enduring innovations and highly creative games - including polyominoes and pentomino - emerged from his inimitable genius. But beyond the innumerable accomplishments, Professor Golomb was also a dear friend and colleague, having served on USC's faculty for more than half a century. Indeed, he helped transform our university into the world-class institution it is today."[1]
Since this is Memorial Day, I've gleaned from
Wikipedia some memorable
STEM field items of
historical significance that occurred on May 30, as follows. Quite a few of these are not familiar to me, although I immediately recognized
Eugène Catalan,
Hannes Alfvén,
Julius Axelrod,
Marissa Mayer,
Leó Szilárd, and
Rosalyn Yalow.
Events
1966 – Launch of
Surveyor 1, the first US
spacecraft to land on an extraterrestrial body; namely, the
Moon.
1971 – Launch of
Mariner 9 to map 70% of the surface of
Mars.
Births
1423 –
Georg von Peuerbach,
German mathematician and
astronomer (died 1461).
1768 –
Georg Amadeus Carl Friedrich Naumann, German
mineralogist and
geologist (died 1873).
1814 –
Eugène Charles Catalan,
Belgian-
French mathematician (died 1894).
1908 –
Hannes Alfvén,
Swedish physicist, engineer, and
Nobel laureate (died 1995).
1912 –
Julius Axelrod, American
biochemist and
Nobel laureate (died 2004).
1912 –
Erich Bagge, German physicist (died 1996).
1955 –
Jacqueline McGlade,
English-
Canadian biologist, and
ecologist.
1963 –
Helen Sharman, English
chemist and
astronaut.
1975 –
Marissa Mayer, American
computer scientist,
CEO of
Yahoo!
Deaths
1901 –
Victor D'Hondt, Belgian mathematician (born 1841).
1926 –
Vladimir Steklov,
Russian mathematician and physicist (born 1864).
1946 –
Louis Slotin, Canadian physicist and chemist (born 1910).
1964 –
Leó Szilárd,
Hungarian-American physicist and engineer (born 1898).
1995 –
Lofty England, English-
Austrian engineer (born 1911).
2006 –
David Lloyd,
New Zealand biologist (born 1938).
2009 –
Ephraim Katzir,
Israeli biophysicist, 4th
President of Israel (born 1916).
2011 –
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, American physicist and
Nobel laureate (born 1921).
2012 –
Andrew Huxley, English
physiologist, biophysicist, and
Nobel laureate (born 1917).
Reference:
- Marc Ballon and Daniel Druhora, "In memoriam: Solomon Golomb, communications technology pioneer, 83," University of Southern California Press Release, May 9, 2016 .
Permanent Link to this article
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