The Marconi Society, a group established in Palo Alto, CA, to recognize the creative spirit of Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi in today’s scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, has named Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and computer theorist Jack Kiel Wolf as winners of this year’s Marconi Prize.
Jacobs, 77, was cited for his contributions to digital and satellite-based communications. His work was fundamental to the technical and commercial success of Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), a method of digital wireless communications that became the standard for 3G cellular networks around the world.
Wolf, a UC San Diego scientist best known for mathematical research that helped lay the foundations for digital information and communications, died in his La Jolla home on May 12, just after he was selected for the prize. He was 76. The $100,000 honorarium awarded as part of the Marconi Fellowship and Prize will be split between the Jacobs and Wolf families. Past Marconi Prize winners include Adobe Systems founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Metcalfe, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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