Elwyn Berlekamp - Definition and Overview

Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp is professor of mathematics at University of California, Berkeley. He is notable for his work in information theory and combinatorial game theory.

As an undergraduate at MIT, he was a Putnam Fellow in 1961. He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering in 1962. Continuing his studies at MIT, he finished his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1964. His advisors were Claude Shannon, Robert G. Gallager, and John Wozencraft.

With John Conway and Richard Guy, he co-authored Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, leading to his recognition as one of the founders of combinatorial game theory. His efficient decoding algorithm was key in the implementation of Reed-Solomon error correction.

He has studied such games as Go, philosopher's football, and dots and boxes.

See also: Berlekamp's algorithm for polynomial factorization.