Jorma Rissanen

Biography

Jorma Rissanen received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 1993 "For fundamental contributions to information theory, statistical inference, control theory, and the theory of complexity." He is an information theorist and is known for inventing the lossless data compression, an arithmetic coding technique, and the minimum description length principle.

Rissanen was born in Finland on October 20, 1932. He received his doctoral degree from the Helsinki University of Technology in 1965. He began his career in 1960 when he joined IBM as a researcher. He then joined the faculty of Tampere University of Technology, where he is now professor emeritus. He is a fellow of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, a recipient of the 1998 Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society, the 2006 Kolmogorov Medal and the 2009 Claude E. Shannon Award.