Robert Fano

Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano (11 November 1917 – 13 July 2016) was an Italian-American computer scientist. He was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1] He was born in Turin, Italy.

Robert Fano
Prof. Fano in his office at MIT in 2012
Born	Roberto Mario Fano (1917-11-11)11 November 1917 Turin, Italy
Died	13 July 2016(2016-07-13) (aged 98) Naples, Florida, U.S.
Citizenship	United States of America
Alma mater	MIT
Known for	Shannon-Fano coding, founder of Project MAC
Awards	IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal (1977) Shannon Award (1976) IEEE Fellow (1954)
Scientific career
Fields	computer science, information theory
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis	Theoretical Limitations on the Broadband Matching of Arbitrary Impedances (1947)
Doctoral advisor	Ernst Guillemin

He was known principally for his work on information theory, inventing (with Claude Shannon) Shannon–Fano coding^[2] and deriving the Fano inequality. He also invented the Fano algorithm and postulated the Fano metric.^[3]

Fano died on 13 July 2016 at the age of 98.^[4]

References

1. Markoff, John (13 March 2008). "Joseph Weizenbaum Dies; Computer Pioneer Was 85". The New York Times. p. 22. Retrieved 15 August 2011.
2. Salomon, David (2007). Data compression: the complete reference. Springer. pp. 72–. ISBN 978-1-84628-602-5. Retrieved 15 August 2011.
3. Fano, Robert M. (April 1963). "A heuristic discussion of probabilistic decoding". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 9 (2): 64–73. doi:10.1109/tit.1963.1057827.
4. Conner-Simons, Adam; Gordon, Rachel (15 July 2016). "Robert Fano, computing pioneer and founder of CSAIL, dies at 98". MIT News Office. Archived from the original on 16 July 2016. Retrieved 15 July 2016.