Dave Forney
American information theorist (born 1940)
George David Forney Jr. (born March 6, 1940) is an American electrical engineer who made contributions in telecommunication system theory, specifically in coding theory and information theory.
Biography
Forney received the B.S.E. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1961, summa cum laude, and the M.S. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and 1965, respectively. His Sc.D thesis introduced the idea of concatenated codes.
He is a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering (1989) and National Academy of Sciences (2003). He is a long-time faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Among other things, he is generally credited with being the first to recognize the optimality and practical importance of the Viterbi algorithm, and his tutorial paper on the subject is widely cited.
His work in the Viterbi algorithm and in advancing the understanding of coding theory in general influenced the design of modern digital modems.
In 1965 he joined the Codex Corporation. His design resulted in the first mass-produced 9600 bit/s modem introduced in 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dave Forney” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.