[COFF] In Memoriam: Robert Fano

[John P. Linderman]

I used to bump into Professor Fano in the halls. I recall he made an
observation to the effect, "Americans are very generous unless they think
they are being played for a sucker, in which case they become very mean
spirited." I thought (and still think) that was very insightful. It
explains a lot of politics.

On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 11:46 PM Lawrence Stewart <stewart at serissa.com>
wrote:

> Fano was an information theorist of some note.  He’s known for his role in
> the Shannon-Fano algorithm for data compression (very similar to Huffman
> coding) and for the “Fano Algorithm” for decoding convolutional error
> correcting codes.
>
> In the old days of limited computation, the Fano algorithm was a
> reasonable choice, but in these modern days everyone uses the Viterbi
> Algorithm instead, which requires more computation and state, but is
> guaranteed to give the best answer.
>
> -Larry
>
> I think Fano falls into the “Research Laboratory of Electronics” group of
> MIT folks who do communications engineering, rather than the “CSAIL” group
> of computer scientists.  Of course there is a fair amount of crossover,
> such as Dina Katabi.
>
>
> > On 2019, Jul 12, at 9:12 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> >
> > We lost him in 2016, and he used to work at MIT; unfortunately that's
> all the details that I have for him (apart from being born 11/11/17).
> >
> > -- Dave
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