The Most Influential Man You’ve Never Heard Of

This post is about a brilliant man you’ve likely not heard of but has a share of responsibility in creating our modern, information-rich world.

Sol Golomb. Photo Credit: The Franklin Institute

Solomon Golomb was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1932 to a Lithuanian-Jewish father and a Jewish mother of Russian descent. Like so many brilliant contributors to the world’s bank of knowledge, he came from a lineage of rabbis and scholars.

Before I continue his brief biography, let me share his two major bequeathments to mankind:

1) He is the reason that when you send a text message gossiping about someone, that message is received by your intended recipient and not by some other cellphone in the vicinity. Basically, how does one device identify that a message floating in the air is intended for it? How does one distinguish signal from noise?

Solomon Golomb, by studying Shift Register Sequences, determined how to construct the polynomials used to encode data sent by GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and numerous other telecommunications.

According to Stephen Wolfram, Golomb is, therefore, the man behind the world’s most-used algorithm idea of all time. Wolfram estimates that over an octillion bits (a billion billion billion) have been generated by humanity’s collection of electronic devices.

Golomb was also an avid game designer and linguist. He designed a chess-checkers combo game called ‘Cheskers’ and also described games where collections of shapes can be arranged to tile particular (finite or infinite) regions. He called these ‘polyominoes’ and these investigations and papers inspired games like Tetris and probably down to tiled games like Catan and Azul as well (though that’s speculation on my part).

Returning to Golomb’s wonderful biography:

1) A product of the Baltimore City Schools (along with Prop Joe and Thurgood Marshall. Incidentally, another Jewish-Baltimorean, Leon Uris, failed out of high school), Golomb went on to enroll at John Hopkins. According to Wolfram, Golomb “narrowly avoided a quota on Jewish students by promising he wouldn’t switch to medicine—and took twice the usual course load.”

He ended up graduating in 1951 from Johns Hopkins at 19 years old! He then went to Harvard for grad school in math. In 1955, he went to Scandinavia on a Fulbright and returned with a wife, Bo (Bodil Rygaard) from Denmark.

He then worked for the Jet Propulsion Lab where he set technicians to building electronic implementations of his shift registers. There were lots of military and satellite applications in radar and radiation detection. For example, shift registers could be used in designing jam-resistant radio-controlled missiles. In a major contribution to physics, Golomb led a team that bounced a radar signal off Venus and changed what we knew about Earth-Venus and Earth-Sun distances.

Golomb evidently had a great sense of humor in addition to immense erudition. With regard to extraterrestrial communication, he wrote the following:

“There are two questions involved in communication with Extraterrestrials. One is the mechanical issue of discovering a mutually acceptable channel. The other is the more philosophical problem (semantic, ethic, and metaphysical) of the proper subject matter for discourse. In simpler terms, we first require a common language, and then we must think of something clever to say.”

In his thirties, Golomb transitioned into academia, choosing USC despite offers from Caltech and UCLA. He stayed at USC for 53 years, raised a family, and wrote countless papers. More than 10,000 patents have drawn on his work.

Interestingly, this man responsible for octillion bits of information rarely used computers himself. In a newsletter about information-saturation, I feel compelled to speculate if his level of deep work was made possible by the sort of intense focus that devices, computers, emails, notifications, texts can often interrupt.

He and his wife died within two weeks of each other just short of their 60th wedding anniversary, survived by two daughters, Astrid and Beatrice.

I find Golomb’s story to be wonderful, magical, filled with the best of humanity. I particularly like that a man who worked with missiles, radar and cryptography at the height of the cold war also thought that games were a worthy subject of investigation.

On Legacy:

I’m sure I’m not the only one who wonders if, when I’m gone, I’ll leave an impact on this world. Hopefully, with loved ones, some collection of writings, and students, that will be the case. But, in the world of mass media, we often want MORE. How can I touch and change the lives of MORE people?

I doubt many of us will ever hit the dizzying numbers of Solomon Golomb. There’s a freedom in that. We all make our impacts in the world, big or small. Golomb’s impact was massive. But he went through life, applying deep focus to questions, exploring ‘play’ and ‘work’ and ‘language’ all with a sense of curiosity and wonder. He wasn’t bogged down with the practical and yet his discoveries ended up everywhere. Something sufficiently elegant and simple will always radiate outward.

Warmly,

Raghav

Most of the information for this post comes from the writings of the irrepressible Stephen Wolfram, who personally knew Solomon Golomb. Wolfram is obviously an unbelievably accomplished person in his own right. He’s the CEO of Wolfram Research, headquartered in Champaign, IL, and has done so much for the world of computing and mathematics. He’s also a great and prolific writer.

Wolfram’s article on Golomb: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-19322016/

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