Abstract
Today, June 1, 2002, is the first day of my eighth decade. I have always tried hard to come up with clever names like polyominoes or rep-tiles or graceful graphs for the topics that I’ve introduced. So it’s really a failure of my ability as an inventor of names if anything actually gets named after me. There have been a few failures. The things that I called minimum spanning rulers, Martin Gardner without my permission called Golomb Rulers. Other people have picked up on that, and I’m sort of stuck with it. I did a lot of work when I was at JPL looking at non-linear shift register sequences. I found a statistical model, and when I looked at cycle lengths of random permutations, one thing I showed was that the expected length of the longest cycle relative to the total number of elements had a limit, and I evaluated that limit. Lloyd Welch and several other people participated in this effort. But it was Donald Knuth who named this particular number Golomb’s constant. If a constant had to be named for me, I would prefer it to be something like “3”, rather than some strange transcendental number, but I guess the better constants were already taken. In a couple of papers around 1967 I asked the question: Suppose you had an infinite number of source messages that were geometrically distributed; you couldn’t use Huffman’s compression algorithm, because that requires you to start with the least probable message, and if there are an infinite number of possible messages you can’t quite do that; but I came up with the equivalent of Huffman codes for that case.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Golomb, S.W. (2003). Golomb’s Reminiscences. In: No, JS., Song, HY., Helleseth, T., Kumar, P.V. (eds) Mathematical Properties of Sequences and Other Combinatorial Structures. The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol 726. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0304-0_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0304-0_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-5013-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-0304-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive