Elwyn Berlekamp

Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp was an American mathematician and computer scientist who spent his career as a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was born on September 6, 1940, and died on April 9, 2019. He was widely known for his work in computer science, coding theory and combinatorial game theory. Berlekamp invented an algorithm to factor polynomials and the Berlekamp switching game, and he was one of the inventors of the Berlekamp-Welch algorithm and the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm, both of which are used to implement Reed-Solomon error correction. He also co-invented the Berlekamp-Rabin algorithm, the Berlekamp-Zassenhaus algorithm and the Berlekamp-Van Lint-Seidel graph.