JessieMacWilliams 2007-06-24 16:21:48 2007-06-24 16:21:48 Biography % this is the default PlanetMath preamble. as your knowledge % of TeX increases, you will probably want to edit this, but % it should be fine as is for beginners. % almost certainly you want these \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{amsfonts} % used for TeXing text within eps files %\usepackage{psfrag} % need this for including graphics (\includegraphics) %\usepackage{graphicx} % for neatly defining theorems and propositions %\usepackage{amsthm} % making logically defined graphics %\usepackage{xypic} % there are many more packages, add them here as you need them % define commands here \PMlinkescapeword{degree} \PMlinkescapeword{even} \PMlinkescapeword{path} \emph{Jessie MacWilliams} (1917 - 1990) British mathematician, best known for her work on error-correcting codes with Neil Sloane at the Bell Labs. Born in Stoke-on-Trent, MacWilliams earned a bachelor's and a master's degree from Cambridge, then moved to the United States to continue her education at Harvard. After Harvard she began working at Bell Labs, where she assisted Sloane and co-authored with him {\it The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes}. Because of her work with Sloane, one might guess MacWilliams has \PMlinkname{Erd\H{o}s number}{ErdHosNumber} 3, but there's actually an even shorter path: With Jacobus Hendricus van Lint, MacWilliams wrote a paper on ``Generalized quadratic residue codes'' for {\it IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory} {\bf 24}. Lint in turn wrote with Erd\H{o}s ``On the number of positive integers $\leq x$ and free of prime factors $> y$'' in {\it Simon Stevin} {\bf 40}.