David Slepian

PFC in 3133rd Signal Service Co

ASN#16106111

Born 1923 in PA, Died 2007

County of residence at enlistment: Allegheny County, PA

Other residence(s): Pittsburgh, PA; Ann Arbor, MI; Boston, MA; Morristown, NJ; Summit, NJ; Honolulu, HI; Maplewood, NJ

United States Army, European Theatre of Operations

Occupation before the war: student

College education before the war: Univ. of Michigan, 2 years

College education after the war: Harvard (MA and PhD)

Notes: T/5 in 1944 Christmas Program

Source: 3133rd Program, 15 Sep 1944; 3133rd roster from 10th Mountain Division Museum at Fort Drum; AES 1944 Christmas Dinner Program; photo courtesy Ancestry® and Taylor-Allerdice High School

Dave Slepian was born on June 30, 1923 in Pittsburgh, PA, the younger of two sons. His father had earned a PhD from Harvard and was an engineer, and an associate director of a research lab, at Westinghouse. (The senior Slepian obtained 200 patents over the course of his career.) All four of his grandparents had been born in Russia.

Dave graduated from Taylor-Allerdice High School in Pittsburgh in 1941; he was one of those students who seemed to excel at everything. He earned all As in his high school career (and planned to study research physics in college), was president of his home room, edited the high school newspaper, played the oboe for his high school orchestra AND for an all-city orchestra, and, in his spare time, made things out of aluminum. He was tall and handsome to boot!

He went on to enroll at the University of Michigan where he completed two years of study in physics before he enlisted in the Army. He had registered for the draft on June 30, 1942, his 19^th birthday, and enlisted on June 17, 1943. It’s likely that he was enrolled in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) after completing basic training. (This was a program designed to meet the wartime demand for junior officers and soldiers with technical skills.) The program was disbanded in February, 1944 and by July Dave was becoming part of the 3133 Signal Service Company which was just then being formed at Pine Camp. There he became close friends with a fellow soldier named Jim Yunker and the two would stay in touch for many years.

After the war ended, Dave was able to visit Rome and Nice, and then spent some time at the Army University in Florence. After completing two one-month sessions there, he was assigned to the 977 Signal Service Company. He served in that company until February 14, 1946, when he headed home from Naples on a troop ship. He was discharged from the Army on March 9.

Though he had only completed two years at the University of Michigan, it is possible that some combination of ASTP education and his time in Florence enabled him to earn the equivalent of a BS degree, and he started graduate work in physics in 1946 at Harvard. During those years he lived in an apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston, and met his future wife, Janice “Jan” Berek, when she and a friend got locked out of their apartment and asked the man next door (Dave) to climb in the window and let them in.

He received his MA in 1947 and his PhD in 1949, and then spent a year doing post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge (England) and the Sorbonne in Paris under a Parker Fellowship from Harvard. He and Jan married in Paris in 1950. They would go on to have three children: Anne, Steven, and Don.

Photo of Dave Slepian from his son, Don. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David-Slepian-teaching.jpg

After returning from Europe, Dave went to work in the Mathematics Research Center at Bell Labs where he did pioneering work in algebraic coding theory. He made a number of discoveries and proofs, writing over 50 papers in applied mathematics and electrical engineering, and had phenomena named after him.

He spent the 1958-59 academic year as a visiting professor of electrical engineering at Berkeley.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, he worked out a unique arrangement where he would spend one year as a professor in the mathematics department at the University of Hawaii and then return to his job at Bell Labs for the following year. In the early 1980s he went back to Bell Labs fulltime to head an elite mathematical studies group.

In 1976 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering—one of less than 700 members. He was the winner of a number of major awards including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Alexander Graham Bell Medal. (This was a prestigious award recognizing exceptional contributions to communications and networking, established in 1976 to mark the telephone's invention's centennial, honoring individuals or teams for major societal impacts in telecom.)

He was also awarded the IEEE Centennial Medal, a medal awarded in 1984 to persons deserving of special recognition for extraordinary achievement; it was established to celebrate the Centennial of the founding of the IEEE.

During those years, Jan Slepian also had a distinguished career. She was an award-winning author of more than 20 children’s and young adult books, and published poetry and essays about aging in her late 80s and 90s.

Dave was living in Maplewood, NJ when he died on November 29, 2007. On the occasion of his death, the IEEE Information Theory Society described him as follows: “A researcher of immense depth and breadth, Slepian was known for choosing problems of a fundamental nature and providing solutions that paved the way for many to follow.”