Elwyn Berlekamp, game theorist and coding pioneer, dies at 78

Elwyn Berlekamp, a UC Berkeley mathematician and game theorist whose error-correcting codes allowed spacecraft from Voyager to the Hubble Space Telescope to send accurate, detailed and beautiful images back to Earth, died April 9 at his home in Piedmont, California, from complications of pulmonary fibrosis. A professor emeritus of mathematics and of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Berlekamp was 78. Berlekamp was a "genius" in many areas, according to colleague Richard Karp, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences and holder of computer science's premier honor, the Turing Award. "He was a brilliant person who was always effective in everything he tried to do, whether it was mathematics or game theory or consulting and investment. He had a curious and powerful mind," said Karp, who was the first chair of UC Berkeley's computer sciences division upon its creation and merger with electrical engineering in 1973. Berlekamp succeeded Karp as chair from 1975 to 1977. Berlekamp came of age during the early years of the digital revolution and focused on a problem encountered whenever information is sent from one device to another: How do you account for lost bits of data? He developed algebraic algorithms for compressing images or other information in ways that allowed precise reconstruction, even if parts of the data stream were missing due to noise or faulty transmission.