Andrew Viterbi
Andrew James Viterbi, Ph.D. (March 9, 1935) is an American electrical engineer and businessman.
His orignal name was Andrea, but when he was naturalized in the US, his parents changed it to Andrew, being that Andrea is a female name in many English speaking countries.
Andrew Viterbi was born in Bergamo, Italy to Jewish parents and emigrated with his parents in 1939 to the United States as a refugee. Viterbi entered MIT in 1952, studying electrical engineering. Distinguished faculty members contemporary to his education included Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Robert Fano and Bruno Rossi. After receiving both his S.B. and his S.M. in Electrical Engineering in 1957 from MIT, Viterbi received his Ph.D. in digital communications from the University of Southern California.
He was later a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and UCSD. He is the inventor of the Viterbi algorithm, an algorithm he used for decoding convolutionally encoded data. It is still used widely in error correcting codes present in cellular phones.
Viterbi was the cofounder of Linkabit Corporation, with Irwin Jacobs in 1968, a small military contractor. He was also the founder of Qualcomm Inc. in 1985. As of 2003, he is the president of the venture capitalist The Viterbi Group. In 2000, Viterbi ranked 386th on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, with an estimated worth of $640 million.
On March 2, 2004, the University of Southern California School of Engineering was renamed to the Viterbi School of Engineering in his honor following his $52 million donation to the school.
He is married to Erna Finci.
External links
- Interview with the IEEE History Center.
Categories: Business biography stubs | 1935 births | Living people | American computer scientists | American philanthropists | Computer pioneers | Forbes 400 | Italian-Americans | Jewish-American businesspeople | MIT alumni | Natives of Bergamo | University of Southern California alumni | Members and associates of the US National Academy of Sciences