
Elwyn Berlekamp has died - ColinWright
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwyn_Berlekamp
======
jchallis
There are people who come into your life and change it for the better. Elwyn
did that for me as a mentor, an investor and a teacher. We regularly had lunch
near his office in Rockridge to discuss math and clinical trials, a particular
shared interest of ours.

Elwyn spent a lot of time at MSRI and this Numberphile video captures him
doing something he loved: playing mathematical games.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboGyIilP6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboGyIilP6k)

Elwyn came from Kentucky and KET, the PBS affiliate there, did a really nice
retrospective on his life and work.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHotBRJW4-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHotBRJW4-0)

Thanks for everything Elwyn.

~~~
mjfl
what sort of clinical trials?

~~~
jchallis
Elwyn was very active in bringing pulmonary fibrosis medications to patients,
spending substantial amounts of his own time and money. From that experience,
he was interested in how novel clinical trial designs could assess the
effectiveness of therapies faster for patients while controlling for bias and
luck.

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drallison
I am sorry to learn that Elwyn Berlekamp has died. He was a master of
mathematics and, with John Horton Conway, explored its recreational aspects
including the game of life and pentomino coverings. His company, Cyclotomics,
was the go-to place for custom error correcting codes.

eecs page:
[https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/berlekamp.h...](https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/berlekamp.html)
home page:
[http://math.berkeley.edu/~berlek/](http://math.berkeley.edu/~berlek/) math
page:
[https://math.berkeley.edu/~berlek/index.html](https://math.berkeley.edu/~berlek/index.html)

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nullc
Some months ago a colleague of mine and I were working on coming up with an
intuitive lay explanation of the Berlekamp–Massey algorithm as part of a
greater explanation of some of our work that uses it (
[https://github.com/sipa/minisketch/](https://github.com/sipa/minisketch/) ).

It isn't terribly difficult to work through the algorithm mechanically and see
that it solves the equations that it's intended to solve, but that is a long
way from a good intuitive understanding of it. We spent some time going back
through the original literature describing it and related contemporary work,
but what we found also focused on a rather procedural description that didn't
really strike the insight we were looking for.

At one point, I quipped that I should reach out to Berlekamp and inquire if
this work really weren't the product of reverse engineering instruments found
in a 1967 UFO crash-- given what a remarkable advance it was. :)

I'm sad to hear that the world will never know for sure now.

Although Berlekamp's work has already been important to the world-- impacting
most of the communications and storage devices we interact with--, I expect
that its importance will increase in the future.

Many advances in computer science and related fields have their utility gated
or multiplied by the power and pervasiveness of computing technology. I am
always struck when I read older papers-- even ones as late as the 90s-- and
find them discussing problem sizes at the limits of their computer technology
which my laptop is solving thousands of times per second as part of my
application (or just as part of my research). So I find that my recent work
using the berlekamp-massey algorithm casually applies to problem sizes that
would have probably been unthinkable in the 80s, even using Cyclotomic's
expensive specialized hardware. The increasing power and decreasing cost of
general purpose computing increases the importance and broadens the
applicability of the algorithms we run on it.

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rongenre
I really loved discovering the Winning Ways books as an undergrad:
[https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Ways-Your-Mathematical-
Plays/...](https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Ways-Your-Mathematical-
Plays/dp/1568811306)

I had the opportunity to meet him while he was at Berkeley Quantitative, and
it was an honor.

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dehrmann
I still remember when he interviewed me for a job at ~his hedge fund about 8
years ago. It's incredibly humbling and a bit inspiring to be talking with the
man who is responsible for, at the time, DVDs working, but these days,
probably most reliable data storage and transmission.

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gajjanag
Very sad to hear. From what I know of Berlekamp's academic work, he always had
a good sense of fun in his research. Such researchers are a rarity in my
experience, and thus bring a very valuable aspect to the research enterprise.

As an aside, not many in information/coding theory know that he was the
advisor of Ken Thompson (of UNIX fame) according to Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwyn_Berlekamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwyn_Berlekamp)

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guestfornow
Elwyn was a pioneer of combinatorial game theory and often put his ability to
strategize to good work. Once in the CS department at Berkeley, when someone
proposed a motion of no-confidence against the current department chair, Elwyn
immediately seconded the motion. After a round of laughter, the motion was
dropped. That was during Elwyn's tenure as chair. He will be missed by so many
of us...

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billfruit
Is he the one after whom the 'Berlekamp's Bat' is named?Though I forget what
it is, some thought experiment in probablity/statistics?

~~~
JadeNB
I can't immediately find a definitive attribution, but David MacKay seems to
have coined the name
([https://books.google.com/books?id=AKuMj4PN_EMC&q=Berlekamp's...](https://books.google.com/books?id=AKuMj4PN_EMC&q=Berlekamp's%20Bat)),
and both were at the ECC Design Center
([http://www.eccdesigncenter.com/researchers](http://www.eccdesigncenter.com/researchers)),
so it seems reasonably likely. It appears to be a description of the geometry
of code-word space with respect to the Hamming metric.

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whoknee
Where is obituary or news ?

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powera
{{citation needed}}

~~~
jhfdbkofdcho
“Professor Emeritus of EECS & Mathematics Elwyn Berlekamp passed away on April
9th. He was Chair of EECS from 1977-79 and left an enormous legacy in the
department's Computer Science Division which is still felt today. He will be
dearly missed. @Cal_Engineer @UCBLettersSci”

[https://twitter.com/Berkeley_EECS/status/1116034902305042432](https://twitter.com/Berkeley_EECS/status/1116034902305042432)

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KingFelix
How did he pass?

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vowelless
He was associated with Rentech and the Medallion fund.

[https://digit.hbs.org/submission/renaissance-technologies-
ge...](https://digit.hbs.org/submission/renaissance-technologies-generating-
alpha-without-wall-street-veterans-or-mbas/)

