People

Professor Calderbank works at the interface of mathematics and electrical engineering, where research advances in information theory and coding change the fabric of everyday life. He looks for opportunities where mathematics can change the technology landscape and sometimes he gets lucky - algorithms developed by Professor Calderbank have enabled over a billion voiceband modems to communicate at close to the fundamental Shannon limit.

His most recent work explores the value of multiple antennas in communication and remote sensing. Professor Calderbank is a co-inventor of space-time codes that take advantage of independent channels between different transmit and receive antennas to improve data rates and reliability. In remote sensing he is developing waveforms that make it possible to see faster, to see more finely where necessary and to see with greater sensitivity.

Information theory and coding are subjects that advance by connecting with new directions in science as well as in engineering. Research by Professor Calderbank into quantum error correction started with the question of whether it was possible to assemble reliable quantum computers out of less reliable components by exploiting error correcting codes. Together with Peter Shor and colleagues at AT&T Labs he created the mathematical framework for fault tolerant quantum computation.

Professor Calderbank graduated from Caltech in 1980 with a PhD in mathematics, joined Bell Telephone Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff, and retired from AT&T in 2003 as Vice President for Research. At AT&T he was responsible for the first Research Lab in the world where the focus is data at massive scale, and for managing AT&T intellectual property.

Professor Calderbank grew up in England, was educated at Warwick and Oxford Universities, and taught high school for a year before joining Caltech as a graduate student. He and his wife Ingrid Daubechies live in Princeton with their two children and a standard poodle.

Professor Calderbank directs the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He teaches Coding Theory (ELE 539) in the Electrical Engineering Department and Algebra with Applications (MAT 323) in the Mathematics Department.