ANDREW J. VITERBI was awarded the 2010 IEEE Medal of Honor for his invention of the maximum-likelihood (Viterbi) decoding algorithm for convolutional (trellis) codes.

For those of us who carry cell phones, it may be of interest to know that the Viterbi algorithm is used by all four international standards for digital cellular telephony.

I had the honor of meeting him when I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and attended one of his seminars. He was, in fact, a phenomenal lecturer, and it was his 1971 paper (Convolutional Codes and Their Performance in Communication Systems, IEEE Trans. Commun. Technol. COM-19, 751 (1971)) that piqued my interest in error-correction coding and eventually led to my dissertation.