Mathematician and Engineer. One of the outstanding engineers of the past century, Reed made fundamental contributions to digital computers, communications and radar. He received his academic degrees, including his Ph.D., from the California Institute of Technology and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Upon his discharge, while still a graduate student at Caltech, he participated in the creation of one of the very first digital computers: Northrop Aviation's Magnetic Drum Digital Differential Analyzer (MADDIDA), used to control the guidance system for the Snark cruise missile. From 1951 to 1960, while at MIT, he pioneered in three crucial areas: the development of computer programming languages, the theory of radar design and performance, and the Reed-Muller and Reed-Solomon codes for protecting digital information. In 1963, he joined the faculty at the University of Southern California, where he was a key member of the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as well as a key founding member of both the Signal and Image Processing Institute and the Communication Sciences Institute. With his graduate students, he continued to develop improved decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes, as well as the data compression methods that became the basis for JPEG and the AOL system. His many major awards included election to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (1979), the grade of Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (1973), the receipt of its Hamming Award for Communications (1989) and the Shannon Prize, the highest award for Information Theory. In 1995, he shared IEEE's Masaru Ibuka Award with collaborator Gustave Solomon for their invention of Reed-Solomon Codes. In 1998, he also received the IEEE's Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation.