Harry Nyquist

Harry Nyquist ( Nilsby , 7 February 1889 - Harlingen , 4 April 1976 ) was a Swedish electrical engineer who has been of great importance for the development of information theory . He has done important work in the field of include thermal noise and the digitization of signals (the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem ); see also ADC .

Harry Nyquist was born in Nilsby in Sweden . He emigrated around his 18th to the United States where he between 1912 and 1915 at the University of North Dakota a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in electrical engineeringshrugged. In 1917 he obtained his doctorate from Yale University . He then worked at AT & T to 1934. During that time he worked on telegraph and the forerunner of the fax . During this period he came to his assertion that a signal with twice the maximum frequency of sampling should be to get information loss. In 1934 he changed jobs and joined Bell Laboratories working. There he did research on thermal noise ("Johnson-Nyquist noise ") and stability criteria of feedback amplifiers, the "Nyquist criterion". His research at for sending information required bandwidth laid the foundations for the later work of Claude Shannon that culminated in the emergence of the information theory . Nyquist left Bell Labs in 1954, after which he worked for some time as a part-time consultant to include the Department of Defense.

In 1960 he received the IRE (now IEEE ) Medal of Honor "For fundamental contributions to a quantitative description of thermal noise, data transmission and negative feedback." Harry Nyquist died at the age of 87 inHarlingen (Texas) .