David Slepian

Born: 30 June 1923
Died: 29 November 2007

Early Life and Education

David Slepian was born in Pittsburgh, PA on June 30, 1923. Upon completion of his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, and a stint in the U.S. Army, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in physics in 1949. He continued his studies as a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge and the Sorbonne.

Bell Labs

Upon completion of his studies, Slepian joined the Mathematics Research Center at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, where he spent his career. In his early years at Bell Laboratories he worked on a wide variety of mathematical problems, making important fundamental contributions to the theory of switching and logic, and even designing a warhead for the NIKE missile. In the early 1950's, he turned his talents toward problems in communication or information theory, a discipline which was then in its early stages of development. It was here that he made his most remarkable contributions and established himself among the leading researchers in electrical engineering.

During the 1970's Slepian shared his time between Bell Laboratories and the University of Hawaii, but returned to Bell Labs full time as head of an elite mathematical studies group in the 1980s.

Information Theory and Coding Theory

Slepian's initial efforts in information theory were in the area of detection theory. While working in this area, he became aware of the information theoretic importance of prolate spheroidal wave functions. This led indirectly to his landmark collaboration with H.O. Pollak and H. J. Landau on the characterization of the bandwidth of electrical signals. His most important contribution to detection theory as such was his discovery of the possibility of singular detection. Over the years he also published a number of important papers in the theory of stochastic processes, and was especially interested in zero-crossing problems for Gaussian noise.

Probably Slepian's most important work was done in the area of coding theory. Stimulated by Shannon's early work, Slepian began his quest for good "error-correcting" codes in 1950. In his classic 1956 paper "A Class of Binary Signaling Alphabets," he introduced the now familiar notion of a binary group code. This paper was the first to formulate the coding problem in a modern algebraic setting and to exploit the algebraic properties of codes in a sophisticated way. As such, it was a landmark paper in the development of coding theory. And along with J. Wolf, Slepian made important contributions in the coding of multiple information sources.

Professional Honors

Slepian received many honors and recognitions for his contributions, including selection by the IEEE Information Theory Group’s Prize-Paper award (along with J. Wolf) and was named as the group’s 1974 Shannon Lecturer (the group's highest honor). He was also elected as a Fellow of the IEEE and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, as well as to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. He shares the latter distinction with his father, the late Joseph Slepian. In 1981 he won the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal "For fundamental contributions to communication theory."

Further Research

David Slepian -- Family Memorial Page