Andrew James Viterbi, Ph.D. (Bergamo (Italy) March 9, 1935) is an Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman.
Viterbi was born in Bergamo, Italy to Jewish parents and emigrated with them in 1939 to the United States as a refugee. His original name was Andrea, but when he was naturalized in the US, his parents changed it to Andrew, since Andrea is a female name in many English-speaking countries. Viterbi attended the Boston Latin School,...
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Andrew James Viterbi, Ph.D. (Bergamo (Italy) March 9, 1935) is an Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman.
Viterbi was born in Bergamo, Italy to Jewish parents and emigrated with them in 1939 to the United States as a refugee. His original name was Andrea, but when he was naturalized in the US, his parents changed it to Andrew, since Andrea is a female name in many English-speaking countries. Viterbi attended the Boston Latin School, and then entered MIT in 1952, studying electrical engineering. After receiving both his BS and his MS in Electrical Engineering in 1957 from MIT, Viterbi received his Ph.D. in digital communications from the University of Southern California.
Viterbi was later a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and UCSD. In 1967 he invented the Viterbi algorithm, which he used for decoding convolutionally encoded data. It is still used widely in cellular phones for error correcting codes, as well as for speech recognition, DNA analysis, and many...
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