Jessie MacWilliams
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 The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes.
Because of her work with Sloane, one might guess MacWilliams has Erdős number (http://planetmath.org/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 IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 24. Lint in turn wrote with Erdős “On the number of positive integers and free of prime factors
” in Simon Stevin 40.
| Title | Jessie MacWilliams |
|---|---|
| Canonical name | JessieMacWilliams |
| Date of creation | 2013-03-22 17:18:50 |
| Last modified on | 2013-03-22 17:18:50 |
| Owner | PrimeFan (13766) |
| Last modified by | PrimeFan (13766) |
| Numerical id | 4 |
| Author | PrimeFan (13766) |
| Entry type | Biography |
| Classification | msc 01A60 |