J. J. Stiffler

In 1952 he entered Harvard College, where he lived in Adams House,[1] and graduated in 1956 with an AB magna cum laude in physics.

[2] He immediately moved to Los Angeles and joined the research department of Hughes Aircraft Company.

He received an MS in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1957, and after a year at the Sorbonne on a Fulbright scholarship[3] returned to Caltech, where he completed his PhD in 1962.

[2] In 1959 he began part-time work in the Communications Systems Research Section of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and in 1961 he became a full-time Member of the Technical Staff there.

[6] In 1964 he developed the puncturing technique[7] (and proved the Solomon–Stiffler bound)[8] with Gustave Solomon, and coauthored Digital Communications with Space Applications with Golomb, Andrew Viterbi and two others.