He also was in charge when radar was first used to find the distance to Venus, and of working out how to encode images to be sent from Mars. Solomon Golomb is the person who figured out how to construct all these polynomials. Read the specifications for 3G, LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or for that matter GPS, and you’ll find mentions of polynomials that determine the shift register sequences these systems use to encode the data they send.
But its content lives on in pretty much every modern communications system. Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences, published in 1967-based on his work in the 1950s-went out of print long ago. And the main originator of this idea was Solomon Golomb, who died on May 1-and whom I knew for 35 years. It’s probably the single most-used mathematical algorithm idea in history.
That’s a fairly conservative estimate of the number of times a cellphone or other device somewhere in the world has generated a bit using a maximum-length linear-feedback shift register sequence. The Most-Used Mathematical Algorithm Idea in HistoryĪn octillion.
