Robert Fano

Robert Fano
Prof. Fano in his office at MIT in 2012
Born	Roberto Mario Fano (1917-11-11)11 November 1917 Turin, Italy
Died	13 July 2016(2016-07-13) (aged 98) Naples, Florida
Citizenship	United States of America
Fields	computer science, information theory
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alma mater	MIT
Thesis	Theoretical Limitations on the Broadband Matching of Arbitrary Impedances (1947)
Doctoral advisor	Ernst Guillemin
Known for	Shannon-Fano coding, founder of Project MAC
Notable awards	IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal (1977) Shannon Award (1976) IEEE Fellow (1954)

Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano (11 November 1917 – 13 July 2016) was an Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Fano was born in Turin, Italy in 1917. He was known principally for his work on information theory, inventing (with Claude Shannon) Shannon-Fano coding and deriving the Fano inequality. He also invented the Fano algorithm and postulated the Fano metric. In the early 1960s, he was involved in the development of time-sharing computers, and from 1963 until 1968 served as founding director of MIT's Project MAC, which evolved to become what is now known as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Fano also helped to create MIT's original computer science curriculum. He retired from active teaching in 1984.

Fano's father was the mathematician Gino Fano, his older brother was physicist Ugo Fano, and his cousin was Giulio Racah. He grew up in Turin and studied engineering as an undergraduate at the School of Engineering of Torino (Politecnico di Torino) until 1939, when he emigrated to the United States as a result of anti-Jewish legislation passed under Benito Mussolini. He received his S.B. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1941, before joining the staff of the MIT Radiation Laboratory. After the war, he received an Sc.D., also from MIT, in 1947; his thesis, entitled "Theoretical Limitations on the Broadband Matching of Arbitrary Impedances", was supervised by Ernst Guillemin. He joined the MIT faculty in 1947. Between 1950 and 1953, he led the Radar Techniques Group at Lincoln Laboratory. In 1954, Fano was made an IEEE Fellow for "contributions in the field of information theory and microwave filters".