Quick Facts
Biography
Jorma J. Rissanen (born 20 October 1932) is an information theorist, known for inventing the arithmetic coding technique of lossless data compression, and the minimum description length principle. His work inspired by the development of the mathematical object stochastic chains with memory of variable length.
An IBM researcher since 1960, Rissanen received his Ph.D. from the Helsinki University of Technology in 1965. Retired from IBM, he is now professor emeritus of Tampere University of Technology, and a fellow of Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.
Awards and recognitions
He was awarded the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 1993, an IEEE Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1998, the Kolmogorov Medal of the University of London in 2006, and the IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award in 2009. A Festschrift collection was published by the Tampere University of Technology in honor of his 75th birthday.
