“The best people are in the US, but why aren't they working for 10 years, 20 years on the same problem?” he said. But Bilkent also allowed him to pursue his potentially fruitless battle with the Shannon limit. Arıkan helped establish its engineering school. “When you do error-correction coding, you are in Shannon theory,” he says.Īrıkan finished his doctoral thesis in 1986, and after a brief stint at the University of Illinois he returned to Turkey to join the country's first private, nonprofit research institution, Bilkent University, located on the outskirts of Ankara. Even as he pursued his thesis on the networking problem that Gallager had pointed him to, he seized on a piece that included error correction. He wanted to solve the problem that stood in the way of reaching the Shannon limit. There was one reason: “Bob Gallager was there,” he says.īut not for Arıkan. The subject fascinated Arıkan, who chose MIT for graduate studies.

By publishing a general mathematical theory of information-almost as if Einstein had invented physics and come up with relativity in one swoop-Shannon set a foundation for the internet, mobile communications, and everything else in the digital age. Shannon's achievement was to understand how the hitherto fuzzy concept of information could be quantified, creating a discipline that expanded the view of communication and data storage. The field was still young, launched in 1948 by Claude Shannon, who wrote its seminal paper while he was at Bell Labs he would later become a revered MIT professor. It was like being blessed by a saint.Īrıkan devoured his courses, especially in information theory. Within his first few days, he was in an orientation session addressed by legendary physicist Richard Feynman.

He found the US to be a strange and wonderful country. Arıkan wanted to study, and because of his excellent test scores he managed to transfer to CalTech, one of the world's top science-oriented institutions, in Pasadena, California. But in 1977, partway through his first year, the country was gripped by political violence, and students boycotted the university. “You do calculations and things turn out as you calculate it.”Īrıkan entered the electrical engineering program at Middle East Technical University. “I like things that have some precision,” he says. He found comfort in engineering and the certainty of its mathematical outcomes. This fuzziness disturbed young Erdal he decided against a career in medicine. When he was a teenager, his father remarked that, in his profession, two plus two did not always equal four.

Erdal Arikan was born in 1958 and grew up in Western Turkey, the son of a doctor and a homemaker.

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