Marcel J. E. Golay

Marcel Jules Edouard Golay (; May 3, 1902 – April 27, 1989) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, and information theorist, who applied mathematics to real-world military and industrial problems. He was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

Career Golay studied electrical engineering at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zürich. He joined Bell laboratories in New York City in 1924, spending four years there. He received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1931.

Golay then joined the US Army Signal Corps, eventually rising to the post of Chief Scientist. He was based mostly in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. He developed an IR "radar" based on its Golay Detector, the SCR-268T specifically designed to the detection of vessels (S/S Normandie was detected at its inaugural crossing). The SCR-268 (using Barkausen vacuum tubes) and the SCR-268T were to work together. However the 268T, only used in the Pacific theater was abandoned before the end of the war. He remained with Perkin-Elmer for the rest of his life.

Achievements Discoverer of the famous binary and ternary Golay codes, which are perfect error-correcting codes that generalize the Hamming code. They were used in the Voyager probes, and led to advances in the theory of finite groups. Co-author with Abraham Savitzky of the Savitzky–Golay filter. Inventor of the Golay cell, a type of infrared detector. He introduced complementary sequences. Those are pairs of binary sequences whose autocorrelation functions add up to zero for all non-zero time shifts. Today they are used in various WiFi and 3G standards. He introduced the theory of dispersion in open tubular columns (capillary columns) and demonstrated their efficacy at the Second International Symposium on Gas Chromatography at Amsterdam in 1958.

Significant bibliography