Biographies

Elwyn R Berlekamp

Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp (born September 6, 1940 in Dover, Ohio, United States of America) is a professor emeritus of mathematics and EECS at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his work in information theory and combinatorial game theory. While an undergraduate at MIT, he was a Putnam Fellow in 1961. He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering in 1962. Continuing his studies at MIT, he finished his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1964; his advisors were Claude Shannon, Robert G. Gallager, Peter Elias and John Wozencraft. Berlekamp taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1964 until 1966, when he became a researcher at Bell Labs. In 1971, Berlekamp returned to Berkeley, where, as of 2008, he is a Professor of the Graduate School. As of 2008, he is the only member of the mathematics faculty who does not possess a degree in mathematics. Berlekamp is one of the inventors of the Welch-Berlekamp and Berlekamp-Massey algorithms, which are used to implement Reed-Solomon error correction. In the mid-1980s, he was president of Cyclotomics, Inc., a corporation which developed error-correcting code technology. With John Horton Conway and Richard K. Guy, he co-authored Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, leading to his recognition as one of the founders of combinatorial game theory. He has studied various games, including Fox and Geese and other fox games, dots and boxes, and, especially, Go. With David Wolfe, Berlekamp co-authored the book Mathematical Go, which describes methods for analyzing certain classes of Go endgames. Outside of mathematics and computer science, Berlekamp has also experienced tremendous success in money management. In 1986, on behalf of Axcom Trading Advisors, a futures trading company, Berlekamp began information-theoretic studies of commodity and financial futures. In 1989, Berlekamp purchased a majority interest in Axcom. After the firm's futures trading algorithms were rewritten, Axcom's flagship fund had a return (in 1990) of 55%, net of all management fees and transaction costs. Today, this fund is known as the Medallion Fund and is managed by James Harris Simons and his Renaissance Technologies Corporation. Berlekamp and his wife Jennifer have two daughters and a son and live in Piedmont, California.

In 1973, my wife and I and Solomon Golomb cofounded Cyclotomics as a very small consulting company. For several years, it consisted of only two part-time employees: myself and a secretary. In 1982 I reduced my faculty appointments at UC Berkeley to 50% in order to spend more time on Cyclotomics. I managed Cyclotomics as its CEO. As a director, Jennifer Berlekamp played a major role in personnel policy and physical plant, creating a friendly and productive working environment at Cyclotomics. Using only retained earnings and no outside investors, the company grew to 40 people. We were known as "experts in error-correcting codes". In December of 1985, Eastman Kodak acquired Cyclotomics and renamed it "Kodak Berkeley Research". I then also served on the internal board for Kodak's Federal Systems Division from 1986 through 1989.

In 1984 some of Cyclotomics' small consulting contracts dealing with commercial cryptography were spun off into a new company called Cylink, which I cofounded with Jim Omura, its first CEO. Jim became CTO when we hired Lew Morris to be CEO. Cylink received venture capital funding in 1985. I became an outside member of its Board of Directors. Cylink grew to over 400 employees, and went public on NASDAQ in 1995. The stock soared and remained aloft even after Lew Morris had a debilitating stroke. We recruited a new CEO and expanded our Board of Directors to nine, to include such very well-known people as Silicon Valley marketing guru Regis McKenna and former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, as well as Wall Street wizard Jim Simons. In the mid 1990s, I served as the liaison between Cylink's Science Advisory Board and its governing Board of Directors. I was also one of the three members of the Board's audit committee. This became a more intense educational experience than anyone had expected. After we discovered some serious problems with revenue recognition, we ordered a forensic audit, and then fired our CEO, CFO, and VP of Sales. We restated earnings and worked through class-action litigation for several subsequent years. Cylink's boom, financial scandal, and bust all happened a couple of years earlier than similar but better known sagas in many other companies. Cylink survived these crises, and was eventually merged into another NASDAQ company called Safenet.

For most of the 1980s, I served, along with John and Patti Torode, on the board of their company, IC Designs. In the early 1990s, it prospered and was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor. It became Cypress Timing Technology, Cypress' most successful division for a time.

In the late 1980s I also began studying and making small investments in a variety of instruments including private placements, angel investments, and venture capital funds. Some were successful and some were not.

In 1986, in an effort to learn more about futures and derivatives, I began spending a couple days a month consulting for Axcom, a small company whose sole business was to devise computer-based systematic trading strategies and use them to manage all trading of the Medallion Fund, of which Jim Simons was then the Pool Operator. My interactions with them lapsed for several months in the spring in 1989 while I was preoccupied with revising my part of the Kodak organization chart to optimize it after my impending exit. When I visited Axcom again that summer, I was surprised to find that their performance had deteriorated badly. Several of my earlier recommendations had been implemented incorrectly or ignored. Believing this to be a turnaround opportunity, I bought the biggest share of Axcom and became its CEO. Sandor Straus and other members of Axcom moved from Newport Beach to Berkeley. We were pleasantly surprised both by the speed and the magnitude of the turnaround. We resumed trading in late 1989. Calendar 1990 was a very good year. After deducting our fees of 5% of assets and 20% of profits, the net return to our investors that year was 55%. Jim Simons was eager for us to move to New York to be closer to the markets. But I wanted instead to devote more time to academic pursuits. So I sold out to Jim Simons at six times the price for which I had bought my Axcom interests 16 months earlier. It is now worth over a thousand times more. The Medallion fund has continued to be extraordinarily successful ever since. It is now widely regarded as THE most successful hedge fund in the world.

In 1991 I accepted the invitation of Alice and Klaus Peters to join them in cofounding their own small publishing company, A.K. Peters, Ltd. They were by far the best of several publishers with whom I had worked as an academic author. Their company publishes high-quality books and journals in mathematics and computer science, and sells them at reasonable prices. In 2006 we expanded the board from three to five to include William Randolph Hearst III and Fields Medalist David Mumford.

In the 1990s I became more involved in nonprofits.

In 1992, I joined Tom Rodgers (an Atlanta businessman and puzzle enthusiast) and Mark Setteducati (a prominent professional magician) in organizing a gathering of fans of Martin Gardner, the writer whose Scientific American column on Mathematical Games had inspired many in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. This first "Gathering for Gardner", was followed by "Gathering for Gardner 2", and then a third. The fourth was called G4G4, followed by G4G5, G4G6, etc. In 2007 we institutionalized these events as a nonprofit 5013C corporation named G4G, through which we are continuing and expanding our efforts to increase public appreciation of the importance of curiosity-driven math and science.

From 1994 to 1998, I was Chairman of the Board of MSRI, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, an NSF-funded independent organization located in Berkeley. I chaired the search committee which recruited a new director, David Eisenbud, and much of a new board. We eventually succeeded in raising private donations to fund increased programs and a new auditorium. As one of the world's two leading research centers for core mathematics, MSRI rivals the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, (which is also independent of the University located in the same town). More than a dozen foreign countries have established their own national mathematics research centers based on MSRI's model.

From 2001-2003 I was Chairman of the Board of ICSI, the International Computer Sciences Research Institute, another nonprofit research organization based in Berkeley. Although ICSI is less well-known than MSRI, its budget, much of which was originally funded by European governments, is more than twice as large.

In 2004, in cooperation with the East Bay Community Foundation, I sponsored and organized a fair for nonprofit organizations focussed on K-12 education. Over 20 such organizations came to exchange ideas and to build some alliances. Many donors also came, and some increased their support for a broader range of organizations. These fairs have become an annual event, now also attended by influential California state legislators.

I was elected to the NAE in 1977. I have been an active member of the NAS Finance Committee since 2000, and a new member of the NAE Finance Committee since September 2007. I was elected to the NAS in Applied Mathematics in 1999. I later became a founding member of its Section on Computer and Information Science.

Dr. Solomon Golomb

Dr. Golomb, while completing his Ph.D., spent a year in Norway as a Fulbright Fellow. He then worked as a Senior Research Mathematician at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, later becoming Research Group Supervisor and then Assistant Chief of the Telecommunications Research Section, where he played a key role in formulating the design of deep-space communications for the subsequent lunar and planetary explorations. Dr. Golomb, who joined USC as a Professor in 1963, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of both the IEEE and AAAS. He received the USC Presidential Medallion in 1985, was awarded the title of University Professor in 1993, and won the Shannon Award of the Information Theory Society of the IEEE in 1985. He became a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Science in 1994. He has received numerous awards and medals, as well as two honorary doctorate degrees. He was appointed the first holder of the Viterbi Chair in Communications in 1999. He holds a joint appointment in the department of Mathematics.

Dr. P. Vijay Kumar

P. Vijay Kumar received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from IIT Kharagpur and IIT Kanpur and the Ph.D. Degree from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, in 1983, all in Electrical Engineering. Since 1983 he has been the faculty of the EE-Systems Department of USC and since 2003, on leave of absence at the ECE Department of IISc, where he additionally is an associate faculty member of the CSA department. Prof. Kumar was an Associate Editor for Coding Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 1993-1996. A 2008 paper received the DCOSS 2008 best paper award (algorithmic track). In 1994, he received the USC School-of-Engineering Senior Research Award for contributions to coding theory. He is a co-recipient of the IEEE Information Theory Society 1995 Prize Paper Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Dr. Dorothy Bollman

Dorothy Bollman holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held faculty positions at Michigan State University, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, and the Unviersity of Puerto Rico and research positions at Cornell University, Indiana University, and the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. She is a member of the editorial board of Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience and a past editor of Mathematical Reviews.

Dr. Ivelisse Rubio

Dr. Ivelisse M. Rubio was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics from the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University. Her research interests are applications of computational algebra, finite fields and coding theory. Dr. Rubio was a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Puerto Rico-Humacao until July, 2007. She has directed undergraduate research projects in computational mathematics or coding theory of over fifteen minority students that resulted in numerous presentations and publications in undergraduate forums. Professor Rubio has been involved in many activities to promote minority undergraduate students to graduate studies. In 1998, her first year at the UPR, Humacao campus, she co-founded, together with Herbert Medina, the recognized REU Summer Institute in Mathematics for Undergraduates (SIMU). She is now one of the Co-directors of the undergraduate research program at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, MSRI-UP. In 2006 SIMU received the American Mathematical Society's award to "Programs that make a difference", being this the first time that this award was given by the AMS. For her work related to the mathematics activities at SACNAS conference she and Ricardo Cortez received a 2006 SACNAS Presidential Service Award. Since July 2007 she has been a professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.