Alexander Vardy (12 November 1963 - 11 March 2022) was a Russian-born and Israeli-educated electrical engineer known for his expertise in coding theory. ^[1] He held the Jack Keil Wolf Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. ^[2] The Parvaresh–Vardy codes are named after him. ^[3]

Vardy was born in Moscow in 1963. ^{[1] [4]} He graduated from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1985, ^[4] and completed his Ph.D. in 1991 at Tel Aviv University. ^{[1] [5]} During his graduate studies, he also worked on electronic countermeasures for the Israeli Air Force, attaining the rank of Seren (Captain). ^[4] He became a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center for two years, then became a faculty member of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign before moving to UCSD in 1996. ^{[1] [4]} He served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 1998 to 2001. ^{[1] [6]}

In 2004 a paper by Ralf Koetter and Vardy on decoding Reed–Solomon codes was listed by the IEEE Information Theory Society as the best paper in information theory of the previous two years; the resulting decoding algorithm has become known as the Koetter–Vardy algorithm. ^[1] Vardy was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1999. ^{[2] [7]} He became the Jack Wolf Professor in 2013. ^[2] He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2017. ^[8]

Vardy died on March 11, 2022, at the age of 58. ^[9]

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