JTA reports a son and grandson of Vilna rabbis has been named the winner of a prestigious science award for his work in mathematics.

Solomon Wolf Golomb, a University of Southern California professor, will receive the Benjamin Franklin Medal given out by the Franklin Institute for his work on the leading edges of science and engineering. Golomb is to receive the Franklin Institute’s 2016 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering for his work in space communications and the design of digital spread spectrum signals–transmissions which provide security, noise suppression and precise locations for applications such as cryptography, missile guidance, defense, space and cellular communications, radar, sonar and GPS. The award will be presented at the Philadelphia-based institute at a ceremony in April of 2016.

The Franklin Medal was the most prestigious of the awards presented by the Franklin Institute since 1824. With other awards, it was merged into the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 1998. With this award, Golomb will join the ranks of previous Franklin Medal recipients and distinguished laureates, which include Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Stephen Hawking, Elizabeth Blackburn and Andrew Viterbi PhD ’62, the alumnus for whom the USC engineering school is named.

Golomb, 83, works with math which has applications in space and cellular communications, cryptography, missile guidance, radar, sonar and the global positioning system. In one branch of his research, Golomb’s work was the foundation for the process called CDMA, or Code Division Multiple Access, which allows hundreds of thousands of cell phones in the same city to communicate at the same time.

Among “recreational mathematics” gamesters, Golomb is revered as a guru and, among other contributions, is the inventor of “cheskers,” a hybrid of chess and checkers.

He serves on the Technion’s international board of governors and speaks fluent Hebrew. Golomb serves as a Torah reader at campus High Holidays services and is involved in both Hillel and Chabad activities.

Born in Baltimore, Dr. Golomb was graduated from Johns Hopkins. He completed his Ph.D. for Harvard College, “Problems in the Distribution of the Prime Numbers.” Prime numbers, which might or might not be predictable or producible, are used heavily in encryption. Working at the Glenn L. Martin Company he became interested in communications theory and began work on shift register sequences, or numbers sets where previous numbers determine subsequent numbers. He spent a year at the University of Oslo as a Fulbright Fellow. He then worked as a senior research mathematician at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, later becoming research group supervisor and then assistant chief of the Telecommunications Research Section, where he played a key role in formulating the design of deep-space communications for subsequent lunar and planetary explorations. Golomb became a professor at USC in 1963 and was awarded full tenure two years later.

Golomb pioneered the identification of the characteristics and merits of maximum length shift register sequences, also known as pseudo-random or pseudo-noise sequences, which have extensive military, industrial and consumer applications. Today, millions of cellular phones employ pseudo-random direct-sequence spread spectrum implemented with shift register sequences. His work put USC on the map as a center for communications research

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of both the IEEE and AAAS. He received the USC Presidential Medallion in 1985, was awarded the title of University Professor in 1993, and won the Shannon Award of the Information Theory Society of the IEEE in 1985 and the Hamming Medal of the IEEE in 2000. He became a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Science in 1994. He has received numerous awards and medals, as well as two honorary doctorate degrees. He was appointed the first to occupy the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Chair in Communications at USC in 1999. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Mathematics.

Golomb was one of the first high profile professors to attempt the Ronald K. Hoeflin Mega IQ power test, which originally appeared in Omni Magazine. He scored at least IQ 176, which represents one person in a million from the unselected population.

In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. It was announced the same year he would receive the National Medal of Science. In 2014 he was elected as a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics “for contributions to coding theory, data encryption, communications, and mathematical games.”

Golomb is also a regular contributor to magazines and journals. He writes Golomb’s Puzzle Column in the IEEE Information Society Newsletter. He was a frequent contributor to Scientific American’s Mathematical Games column. He contributes a puzzle to every issue of the Johns Hopkins Magazine, a monthly publication of his undergraduate alma mater, for a column called “Golomb’s Gambits,” and is a frequent contributor to Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.

The Golomb sequence in mathematics is named after him. To date no one has publicized a way to generate prime numbers ab nullo, ab chao, they are only discovered by “brute-forcing” candidates looking for possible divisors.

JTA report here.

Fuller description of work and award here.