Henry O. Pollak


Henry Otto Pollak is an Austrian-American mathematician. He is known for his contributions to information theory, and with Ronald Graham is the namesake of the Graham–Pollak theorem in graph theory.
Born in Vienna, Austria, he since moved to United States. He received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Yale University. While at Yale, he participated in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and was on the team representing Yale University that won the second prize in 1947. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Harvard University, the latter on the thesis Some Estimates for Extremal Distance advised by Lars Ahlfors.
Pollak then joined Bell Labs, where he in the early 1960s became director of the Mathematics and Statistics Research Center. He authored near forty papers, many of these with David Slepian and Henry Landau on analysis, function theory, probability theory, and mathematics education. He has applied mathematics to solve problems in physics and networks, communication theory, discrete systems, statistics and data analysis, and economic analysis. Pollak also holds patents in the area of signaling. He has held teaching positions in the mathematics department at Columbia University.

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