Richard Blahut (born June 9, 1937), former chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, is best known for his work in information theory (e.g. the Blahut–Arimoto algorithm used in rate–distortion theory). He received his PhD Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1972. Blahut was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1990 for pioneering work in coherent emitter signal processing and for contributions to information theory and error control codes. Source: Wikipedia (en)