CONGRATULATIONS ARE ON ORDER: Life Fellow G. David Forney Jr. will receive the 2016 IEEE Medal of Honor “for pioneering contributions to the theory of error-correcting codes and the development of reliable high-speed data communications.”

A well-deserved (and overdue) honor. What's interesting to me is that Forney's doctoral dissertation Concatenated Codes (1966) was a precursor to my own dissertation, Concatenated Convolutional Codes (1978), where I investigated the same error-correcting structures applied to convolutional (trellis) codes.