Thomas Cover

Thomas M. Cover was an American information theorist who held a joint professorship in electrical engineering and statistics at Stanford University. He spent his career on the relationship between information theory and statistics, and his work reached into learning, statistical complexity, pattern recognition and portfolio theory. He earned a physics degree at MIT in 1960 and a doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1964, supervised by Norman Abramson, and he later supervised 64 doctoral students. He served as president of the IEEE Information Theory Society, was chosen as the Shannon Lecturer in 1990 and received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 1997. With Joy A. Thomas he wrote Elements of Information Theory, which became the most widely used introductory textbook on the subject. His name is attached to Cover's theorem and to the nearest neighbor classification work he published with Peter Hart in 1967.