, as Roberto Mario Fano) is an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

-American computer scientist, currently professor emeritus

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 of Electrical Engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

 and Computer Science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

. Fano is known principally for his work on information theory

Information theory

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Information theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and...

, inventing (with Claude Shannon) Shannon-Fano coding. In the early 1960s, he was involved in the development of time-sharing

Time-sharing

Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...

 computers, and served as director of MIT's Project MAC from its founding in 1963 until 1968.

Fano's father was the mathematician Gino Fano

Gino Fano

Gino Fano was an Italian mathematician. He was born in Mantua, Italy and died in Verona, Italy.Fano worked on projective and algebraic geometry; the Fano plane, Fano fibration, Fano surface, and Fano varieties are named for him....

; his older brother was physicist Ugo Fano

Ugo Fano

Ugo Fano was an Italian American physicist, a leader in theoretical physics in the 20th century.- Biography :Ugo Fano was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Turin, Italy...

. He grew up in Turin and studied engineering as an undergraduate at the School of Engineering of Torino until 1939, when he emigrated to the United States. He received his S.B.

Bachelor's degree

A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...

 in electrical engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

 from MIT in 1941, before joining the staff of the MIT Radiation Laboratory. After the war, he received an Sc.D., also from MIT, in 1947; his thesis, entitled "Theoretical Limitations on the Broadband Matching of Arbitrary Impedances", was supervised by Ernst Guillemin

Ernst Guillemin

Ernst Adolph Guillemin was an American electrical engineer and computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who spent his career extending the art and science of linear network analysis and synthesis.-Biography:Guillemin was born in 1898, in Milwaukee, and received his B.S. and...

. He joined the MIT faculty in 1947. Between 1950 and 1953, he led the Radar Techniques Group at Lincoln Laboratory

Lincoln Laboratory

MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and development activities focus on long-term technology development as well as...

.

Fano is a member of the National Academy of Sciences

United States National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

 and the National Academy of Engineering

National Academy of Engineering

The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...

. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

 and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is a non-profit professional association headquartered in New York City that is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence...

.

Fano received the Claude E. Shannon Award

Claude E. Shannon Award

The Claude E. Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society was instituted to honour consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. Each Shannon Award winner is expected to present a Shannon Lecture at the following IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory...

 in 1976 for his work in information theory.

External links

• Oral history interview with Robert M. Fano 20 April 1989. Charles Babbage Institute
  Charles Babbage Institute
  The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
  
   University of Minnesota. Fano discusses his move to computer science from information theory and his interaction with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Topics include: computing research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the work of J.C.R. Licklider at the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA; time-sharing and computer networking research; Project MAC; computer science education; CTSS development; System Development Corporation
  System Development Corporation
  System Development Corporation , based in Santa Monica, California, was considered the world's first computer software company.SDC started in 1955 as the systems engineering group for the SAGE air defense ground system at the RAND Corporation...
  
   (SDC); the development of ARPANET; and a comparison of ARPA, National Science Foundation, and Office of Naval Research computer science funding.
• Video of Robert Fano from 1964, demonstrating the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).