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Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)

blog.stephenwolfram.com

1–10 of 34 posts

Re: Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)

#3
> Berlekamp also created an algorithmic trading system that he sold to Jim Simons and that became a starting point for Renaissance Technologies, now the world’s largest hedge fund.

Renaissance isn't the world's largest hedge fund.

Re: Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)

#4
I first encountered his name when learning data encoding which used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_coding.

One thing that struck me there was the use of unary coding, which I thought was pretty cool. In my case I was writing a JPEG-LS decoder. Looking at the wiki, I see it is also used in some audio codecs as well.

Re: Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)

#5
If, like me, you've learned to avoid everything Mr. Wolfram writes do yourself a favor and make an exception to read this one. It's great. Either he's learning from his mistakes or the meds are working.

Re: Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)

#6
post #4

I first encountered his name when learning data encoding which used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_coding . One thing that struck me there was the use of unary coding, which I thought was pretty cool. In my case I was writing a JPEG-LS decoder. Looking at the wiki, I see it is also used in some audio codecs as well.

Also neat (and a prefix code) is Fibonacci coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_coding

Re: Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)

#7
"""biology uses a more straightforward encoding, where some of the 64 possible triples just don’t represent anything"""

I don't think this is strictly true, 61 of the 64 codons translate into 1 of 20 amino acids, and the other 3 are "stop" codons, which I'd argue do represent something. (and at least one of those is sometimes translated as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenocysteine)

Re: Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)

#9
post #5

If, like me, you've learned to avoid everything Mr. Wolfram writes do yourself a favor and make an exception to read this one. It's great. Either he's learning from his mistakes or the meds are working.

This comment was flagged dead (maybe justifiably), but I vouched to bring it back. While it may sound like an insult, I felt the same pleasant surprise as 'tacos' while reading it. This was definitely a different voice than usual for Wolfram, and I genuinely hope it's because he's taken feedback from others on how his tone sometimes comes across.
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