Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp

Known for his work in information theory and combinatorial game theory, Berlekamp was one of the inventors of the Welch–Berlekamp and Berlekamp–Massey algorithms, which are used to implement Reed–Solomon error correction.

While an undergraduate at MIT, Berlekamp 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, he returned to Berkeley, where he served as a Professor of the Graduate School from 2010. As of 2008, Berlekamp was the only member of the mathematics faculty who did not possess a degree in mathematics.

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, Berlekamp co-authored Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, leading to his recognition as one of the founders of combinatorial game theory.

He studied various games, including Fox and Geese and other fox games, dots and boxes, and, especially, Go. With David Wolfe, he co-authored the book Mathematical Go, which describes methods for analyzing certain classes of Go endgames.