Alexander Vardy

Alexander Vardy (12 November 1963 - 11 March 2022) was a Russian-born and Israeli-educated electrical engineer known for his expertise in coding theory.[1] He held the Jack Keil Wolf Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.[2] The Parvaresh–Vardy codes are named after him.[3]

Vardy was born in Moscow in 1963.[1][4] He graduated from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1985,[4] and completed his Ph.D. in 1991 at Tel Aviv University.[1][5] During his graduate studies, he also worked on electronic countermeasures for the Israeli Air Force, attaining the rank of Seren (Captain).[4] He became a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center for two years, then became a faculty member of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign before moving to UCSD in 1996.[1][4] He served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 1998 to 2001.[1][6]

In 2004 a paper by Ralf Koetter and Vardy on decoding Reed–Solomon codes was listed by the IEEE Information Theory Society as the best paper in information theory of the previous two years; the resulting decoding algorithm has become known as the Koetter–Vardy algorithm.[1] Vardy was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1999.[2][7] He became the Jack Wolf Professor in 2013.[2] He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2017.[8]

Vardy died on March 11, 2022, at the age of 58.[9]