Henry O. Pollak

Henry Otto Pollak (December 13 1927) is an Austrian-American mathematician, known for his contributionsto information theory.

Born in Vienna, Austria, he since moved to USA. While at Yale University for his B.Sc. in mathematics (1947)he participated on silver-award winning teams with celebrated mathematicians as Murray Gell-Mann and Murray Gerstenhaber.He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. (1951) degree in mathematics from
Harvard University, the latter on the thesis "Some Estimates for Extremal Distance" advised by Lars Ahlfors.

Pollak then joined Bell Labs (1951), where he in the early 1960s becamedirector of the Mathematics and Statistics Research Center.He authored near forty papers, many of these with David Slepian and Henry Landau on analysis, function theory, probability theory, and mathematics education.He has applied mathematics to solve problems in physics andnetworks, communication theory, discrete systems, statistics and data analysis, andeconomic analysis. Pollak also holds patents in the area of signalling. [US Patent|3710026] He has held teaching positions in the mathematics department at Columbia University.

Awards

*Earle Raymond Hedrick lecturer (1973)
*Mathematical Association of America chair of New Jersey section (1958–59), governor (1961–63) and president (1975–76).
*honorary "Sc.D." at Bowdoin College (1977) [ [http://library.bowdoin.edu/arch/subject/bowdoin/honors/pollak77.pdf Henry Otto Pollak, honorary Sc.D.] announcement]
*honorary doctorate from Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (1981)
*Dan Christie lecture on "On the Addressing Problem in Loop Switching, or, How to Embed an Arbitrary Graph in a Squashed Cube" at Bowdoin College (1983)
*Mathematical Association of America Meritorious Service Award (1990)

References