I was a sheltered Englishman who’d been in California a couple of years, but hadn’t really ventured outside the university-and was ill prepared for the burst of Southern Californian energy that dropped in to see me that day. Already this was unusual, because in those days there were hopelessly few women to be found around a theoretical high-energy physics group. I get a knock at my office door-and a young woman is there. It was 1981, and I was at Caltech, a 21-year-old physicist who’d just received some media attention from being the youngest in the first batch of MacArthur award recipients. Most of the scientists and mathematicians I know I met first through professional connections. This essay is also in Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People » And-as I learned about 20 years ago-he came very close to discovering my all-time-favorite rule 30 cellular automaton all the way back in 1959, the year I was born. He created and solved countless math and wordplay puzzles. He introduced the world to what he called polyominoes, which later inspired Tetris (“tetromino tennis”). He also was in charge when radar was first used to find the distance to Venus, and of working out how to encode images to be sent from Mars. Solomon Golomb is the person who figured out how to construct all these polynomials. Read the specifications for 3G, LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or for that matter GPS, and you’ll find mentions of polynomials that determine the shift register sequences these systems use to encode the data they send. But its content lives on in pretty much every modern communications system. Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences, published in 1967-based on his work in the 1950s-went out of print long ago. And the main originator of this idea was Solomon Golomb, who died on May 1-and whom I knew for 35 years. It’s probably the single most-used mathematical algorithm idea in history. That’s a fairly conservative estimate of the number of times a cellphone or other device somewhere in the world has generated a bit using a maximum-length linear-feedback shift register sequence. The Most-Used Mathematical Algorithm Idea in HistoryĪn octillion.

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