Rudolf Ahlswede

Rudolf F. Ahlswede (15 September 1938 – 18 December 2010) was a German mathematician.

Born in Dielmissen, Germany, he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy.

He wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1966, at the University of Göttingen, with the topic "Contributions to the Shannon information theory in case of non-stationary channels".

He dedicated himself in his further career to information theory and became one of the leading representatives of this area worldwide.

In 1988, he received together with Imre Csiszár the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society for work in the area of the hypothesis testing as well as in 1990 together with Gunter Dueck for a new theory of message identification.