Jack Wolf is Co Recipient of Macaroni Prize

Jack Wolf Is Co-Recipient Of Macaroni Prize

By Joe Purcell
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-06-06

The Macaroni Prize of 2011 (the Nobel Prize for IT) goes to Irwin Jacobs and Jack Wolf. The Macaroni Prize is unrelated to the fact that many in the tech geek community are experts in macaroni and cheese preparation. The Marconi Prize is "awarded annually to individuals whose scope of work and influence carry on the legacy of Guglielmo Marconi, recipient of the 1909 Nobel Prize for his pioneering achievements in wireless technology." Particularly Jack Wolf was instrumental in the development of data storage and transmission through the years.

Jack Wolf recently passed away at 76 years of age on May 12. He was a professor at University of California in San Diego and was an innovator of data transmition and storage and "helped shape the digital innards of computers and other devices that power modern society." As an information theorist, his task was to condense information into as little binary data as possible.

One of Wolf's greatest achievements was developing maximum likelihood detection for data storage. This technique increased hard disk read accuracy and as noted in one article, "every hard disk drive, tape drive, and DVD player made in the last 20 years uses some form of this technology." This technology has significantly aided the development of data storage in recent years.

Another contribution of his was the Slepian-Wolf Theorem, developed with is colleague David Slepian. The theorem has shaped distributed source coding (DSC) and is used in tasks like video and audio compression.

Wolf's work certainly could not be underestimated as one article notes, "The incredible data storage capacity of today's technology owes much to Wolf, whose work helped the industry overcome an impending 'brick wall' of capacity."

About the Author:
Joe Purcell is a technology virtuoso, cyberspace frontiersman, and connoisseur of Linux, Mac, and Windows alike.