Dr. Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp

While an undergraduate at MIT, he was a Putnam Fellow in 1961. He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering in 1962. Continuing his studies at MIT, he finished his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1964; his advisors were Claude Shannon, Robert G. Gallager, Peter Elias and John Wozencraft. Berlekamp taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1964 until 1966, when he became a researcher at Bell Labs. In 1971, Berlekamp returned to Berkeley, where, as of 2010, he is a Professor of the Graduate School. As of 2008, he was the only member of the mathematics faculty who did not possess a degree in mathematics. Berlekamp is one of the inventors of the Welch-Berlekamp and Berlekamp-Massey algorithms, which are used to implement Reed-Solomon error correction. In the mid-1980s, he was president of Cyclotomics, Inc., a corporation which developed error-correcting code technology. With John Horton Conway and Richard K. Guy, he co-authored Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, leading to his recognition as one of the founders of combinatorial game theory. He has studied various games, including Fox and Geese and other fox games, dots and boxes, and, especially, Go. With David Wolfe, Berlekamp co-authored the book Mathematical Go, which describes methods for analyzing certain classes of Go endgames.