User:Krithika maduvegadde/Sandbox

Jessie Mac Willians: The great Mathematician

An important contributor to coding thoery was Jessie MacWilliams. She was born in 1917 in England. After studying at Cmbridge University, MacWilliams came to the United States in 1939 to attend Johns Hopkins University. After one year at Johns Hopkins, she went to Harvard for a year.

In 1955, MacWilliams became a programmer at Bell Labs, where she learned about coding theory. Although she made a major discovery about codes while a programmer, she could not obtain a promotion to a math research position without a Ph.D. degree. She completed some of the requirements for the Ph.D while working full-time at Bell Labs and looking after the family. She then returned to Harvard for a year, where she finished her degree. Interestingly, both MacWilliams and her daughter Ann were studying mathematics at Harvard at the same time.

MacWilliams returned at Bell Labs, she made many contributions to the subject of 1983. While at Bell Labs, she made many contributions to the subject of error-correcting codes, including The Theory of Error-Correcting Code, written jointly with Neil Sloane- a book that is still a leader in the field. One of her results of great theoretical importance is known as the " MacWilliams Identity". She died on May 27, 1990, at the age of 73.