Robert McEliece

Robert J. McEliece was a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where he held the Allen E. Puckett chair, and he was best known for work in error-correcting coding and information theory. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Baltimore, he took his bachelor's degree at Caltech in 1964 and his doctorate in mathematics there in 1967. He worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from his undergraduate years, consulting on error-correcting coding schemes until he retired in 2007. In 1978 he published a public-key cryptosystem based on algebraic coding theory, now called the McEliece cryptosystem. He received the Claude E. Shannon Award in 2004 and the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal in 2009, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998.