Marcel J. E. Golay

Schematic of a Golay cell^[1]

Marcel J. E. Golay (French: [gɔlɛ]; May 3, 1902 – April 27, 1989) was a Swiss-born mathematician, physicist, and information theorist, who applied mathematics to real-world military and industrial problems. He was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.^[2]

Career

Golay studied electrical engineering at the Eidgenossiche 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.^[3]

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 radar systems and invented the Golay Detector which identified the infrared emissions of aircraft.^[3]

Between 1955 and 1963, Golay was a consultant for Philco Corporation of Philadelphia, PA, and the Perkin-Elmer Corporation of Norwalk, Connecticut. In 1963, Golay joined the Perkin-Elmer company full-time as Senior Research Scientist.^[3] Golay worked on many problems, including gas chromatography and optical spectroscopy. He remained with Perkin-Elmer for the rest of his life.

Achievements

• Co-author with Abraham Savitzky of the Savitzky-Golay smoothing filter.
• Development of the Golay codes.
• Generalization of the perfect binary Hamming codes to non-binary codes.
• 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.^[4]

Significant bibliography

• Golay, M. (1949). "Notes on Digital Coding" (PDF). Proc. IRE. 37: 657. 
• Golay, M. (January 1977). "Sieves for low autocorrelation binary sequences". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 23 (1): 43–51. doi:10.1109/TIT.1977.1055653. 
• Golay, M. J. E. (January 1988). "Preparative capillary chromatography-a proposal". Journal of High Resolution Chromatography. 11 (1): 6–8. doi:10.1002/jhrc.1240110103. 
• Golay, M. (April 1961). "Complementary series". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 7 (2): 82–87. doi:10.1109/TIT.1961.1057620. 

External links

• Bibliography of writings by and about Marcel Golay, including awards. Compiled by his daughter, Nona Golay Bloomer (2007).
• Reprints of papers are in the Archives of the Chemical Heritage Foundation: "Finding Aid to Marcel J. E. Golay, 1931-2002 (bulk 1946-1989)". Chemical Heritage Foundation. Chemical Heritage Foundation Archives. Click on 'Golay Box List' to go to full list. 

References