Ed Posner

Edward Charles "Ed" Posner (August 10, 1933 – June 15, 1993) was an American information theorist and neural network researcher who became chief technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founded the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

Posner was born on August 10, 1933, in Brooklyn, and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1950; at Stuyvesant, one of his close friends was mathematician Paul Cohen. He took only two years to complete his undergraduate studies in physics at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1952, and he then switched to mathematics for a master's degree in 1953 and a PhD in 1957. While a graduate student, he also visited Bell Labs, and later claimed that he had been assigned to the desk there that had formerly been Harry Nyquist's. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Irving Kaplansky, was on the subject of ring theory and entitled Differentiably Simple Rings; at only 26 pages long, it held the record for the shortest doctoral thesis at the university.

After finishing his studies, he became a mathematics instructor at the University of Wisconsin and then an assistant professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. In 1961, Solomon W. Golomb hired him to lead the Information Processing Group at JPL. He led the group for 10 years and then, after a sequence of positions in higher management, he became chief technologist in JPL's Office of Telecommunications and Data Acquisition in 1982. He also held lecturer and visiting faculty positions in the applied mathematics and electrical engineering departments of the California Institute of Technology beginning in 1970.

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