Abstract
Jorma Johannes Rissanen, giant of information theory, control theory and statistics, passed away at age 87 after a long illness in Los Gatos, California, on 9 May 2020. Jorma Rissanen was perhaps best known for making arithmetic coding practical and for inventing the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. The importance of both contributions can hardly be overstated. Arithmetic coding is a central part of information theory; the MDL Principle has also had a profound influence on the data sciences: statistics, machine learning and data mining. It has played a central role in making information-theoretic approaches mainstream to those fields.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter |
| Volume | 70 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Pages (from-to) | 13-14 |
| ISSN | 1045-2362 |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2020 |
| MoE publication type | D1 Article in a trade journal |
Fields of Science
- 113 Computer and information sciences
- Information technology