1. Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano was an Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
12 Facts About Robert Fano
1. 2.
Robert Fano became a student and working lab partner to Claude Shannon, whom he admired zealously and assisted in the early years of information theory.
3.
Robert Fano studied engineering as an undergraduate at the School of Engineering of Torino until 1939, when he emigrated to the United States as a result of anti-Jewish legislation passed under Benito Mussolini.
4.
Robert Fano's thesis, titled "Theoretical Limitations on the Broadband Matching of Arbitrary Impedances", was supervised by Ernst Guillemin.
5.
Robert Fano joined the MIT faculty in 1947 to what was then called the Department of Electrical Engineering.
6.
Robert Fano was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958, to the National Academy of Engineering in 1973, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978.
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Robert Fano was known principally for his work on information theory.
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Robert Fano invented the Fano algorithm and postulated the Fano metric.
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From 1963 until 1968 Robert Fano served as the founding director of MIT's Project MAC, which evolved to become what is known as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
10.
Robert Fano helped to create MIT's original computer science curriculum.
11.
In 1976, Fano received the Claude E Shannon Award for his work in information theory.
12.
Robert Fano retired from active teaching in 1984, and died on 13 July 2016 at the age of 98.