Editing Jacob Wolfowitz (section)

==Career==
In the mid-1930s, Wolfowitz began his career as a high school mathematics teacher and continued teaching until 1942 when he received his Ph.D. degree in [[mathematics]] from [[New York University]]. While a part-time graduate student, Wolfowitz met [[Abraham Wald]], with whom he collaborated in numerous joint papers in the field of [[mathematical statistics]]. This collaboration continued until Wald's death in an airplane crash in 1950. In 1951, Wolfowitz became a [[professor]] of mathematics at [[Cornell University]], where he stayed until 1970. From 1970 to 1978 he was at the [[University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign]]. He died of a [[myocardial infarction|heart attack]] in [[Tampa]], Florida, where he had become a professor at the [[University of South Florida]] after retiring from Illinois.

Wolfowitz's main contributions were in the fields of [[decision theory|statistical decision theory]], [[non-parametric statistics]], [[sequential analysis]], and [[information theory]].

One of his results is the strong converse to [[Claude Shannon]]'s [[Shannon's source coding theorem|coding theorem]]. While Shannon could prove only that the [[block error]] probability can not become arbitrarily small if the transmission rate is above the channel capacity, Wolfowitz proved that the block error rate actually converges to one. As a consequence, Shannon's original result is today termed "the weak theorem" (sometimes also Shannon's "conjecture" by some authors).