Eugene August Prange (July 30, 1917 – February 12, 2006)[1][2] was an American coding theorist, a researcher at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory (AFCRL) in Massachusetts who "introduced many of the early fundamental ideas of algebraic coding theory"[3] and was the first to investigate cyclic codes in 1957.
[4][5] With Andrew Gleason, he is the namesake of the Gleason–Prange theorem on the symmetries of the extended quadratic residue code.
[6] Prange was born in Illinois to August Prange and Eugenia Livingston.
[7] He graduated from the University of Illinois and spent World War II serving his country in England as an intelligence officer.
He then studied at Harvard University before joining AFCRL.