Brockway McMillan, American government official and scientist, Died at 101

Brockway McMillan was born on March 30, 1915, in Minneapolis, Minnesota and died on December 3, 2016.

He was an American government official and scientist.

McMillan served as the eighth Under Secretary of the Air Force and the second Director of the National Reconnaissance Office.

McMillan received his B.S. in 1936 and a Ph.D. 1939 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a thesis entitled The calculus of discrete homogenous chaos supervised by Norbert Wiener.

McMillan also served in the U.S. Navy at Dahlgren and Los Alamos during World War II.

Brockway McMillan joined Bell Telephone Laboratories 1946 as a research mathematician and published the article “The Basic Theorems of Information Theory” and proved parts of Kraft’s inequality, sometimes called the Kraft-McMillan theorem (Kraft proved that if the inequality is satisfied, then a prefix code exists with the given lengths.

He showed that unique decodability implies that the inequality holds.

He served as the President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) 1959-1960.

During 1942, while at Princeton University, Brockway McMillan married (Elizabeth) Audrey Wishard (1915–2008) who had a PhD in mathematics from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Boston, in 1938.

He died at his home in Sedgwick, Maine.

Brockway McMillan passed away at 101 years old.