David MacKay
Cambridge physicist and information theorist; author of information-theory-inference-learning-algorithms (2003), which he wrote over roughly a decade while running the Inference research group at university-of-cambridge. Discovered while ingesting that book.
His own research is inside it rather than beside it: chapter 47 cites MacKay’s 1999 results on low-density parity-check codes alongside Gallager’s original 1963 work — MacKay was part of the group that rediscovered LDPC codes decades after they were abandoned as impractical. The book’s acknowledgments name Cambridge, Darwin College, the Royal Society and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation as the backers of the writing, and its dedication is to the campaign against the arms trade.
Not from the ingested source: MacKay also wrote Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air and served as chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. He died in 2016.
Connections
- author of information-theory-inference-learning-algorithms
- affiliation university-of-cambridge
- published by cambridge-university-press