G. David Forney Jr.

In my career in information theory and digital communications, my research has been intimately intertwined with my practical industrial interests. My earliest work was on convolutional coding, particularly for digital space communications, which led directly to a number of fundamental papers on the theory of such codes. Subsequently, at Codex Corporation, which became a subsidiary of Motorola, we designed a number of generations of commercially successful high-speed telephone-line modems, which both influenced and were influenced by advances in the theory of bandwidth-efficient digital communications. Most recently, I have been trying to understand the latest capacity-approaching codes as codes on graphs, with connections to earlier interests in system theory, as well as to statistical physics. There are few engineering fields in which theory and practice are so closely related.