Richard Blahut

Richard Ednard Blahut is an American electrical engineer, communications engineer, and information theorist. He is the former chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, is best known for his work in information theory, including the Blahut–Arimoto algorithm used in rate–distortion theory.

Education and career

Blahut was born in Orange, New Jersey and studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his B.S. in electrical engineering, followed by an M.S. in physics from Stevens Institute of Technology. He carried out his doctoral studies at Cornell University, where he received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1972 under the supervision of information theorist Toby Berger. After graduation, Blahut subsequently taught at Cornell from 1973 to 1994 while working at IBM.
Blahut has taught at Princeton University, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the NATO Advanced Study Institute, and has also been a Consulting Professor at the South [China University of Technology]. He is also the Henryk Magnuski Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Blahut retired from the University of Illinois in 2014.

Blahut was elected a fellow of the Institute of [Electrical and Electronics Engineers|IEEE] in 1981 for the development of passive surveillance systems and for contributions to information theory and error control codes. He received the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship in 1982, when he was also the President of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1990 for pioneering work in coherent emitter signal processing and for contributions to information theory and error control codes. While working at IBM, Blahut received the IBM Outstanding Contribution Award, Outstanding Innovation Award, Corporate Recognition Award. He became a fellow of the IBM Corporation in 1980.
In 1998, Blahut received the IEEE [Alexander Graham Bell Medal] for "contributions to error-control coding, particularly by combining algebraic coding theory and digital transform techniques." In 2005, Blahut received the IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award.