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Peter Elias (November 23, 1923 – December 7, 2001) was a pioneer in the field of information theory. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty from 1953 to 1991.
In 1955, Elias introduced convolutional codes as an alternative to block codes. He also established the binary erasure channel and proposed list decoding of error-correcting codes as an alternative to unique decoding.
Elias received in 1998 a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society; and in 2002 the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, for "fundamental and pioneering contributions to information theory and its applications". He is also a recipient of the Claude E. Shannon Award (1977).
He died at 78 of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.