Jorma Rissanen

Jorma Johannes Rissanen (1932-2020) was a Finnish information theorist known for originating the minimum description length principle and for developing practical approaches to arithmetic coding for lossless data compression. Trained at the Helsinki University of Technology, he worked at IBM, Linkoping University and Tampere University of Technology, and his contributions were recognized with the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 1993, the Kolmogorov Medal of the University of London in 2006 and the Claude E. Shannon Award in 2009.