Vladimir Levenshtein

Vladimir Iosifovich Levenshtein was a Russian and Soviet mathematician who specialized in information theory, error-correcting codes, and combinatorial design. He spent his career as a leading research scientist at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow, having graduated from Moscow State University in 1958. He is best known for developing the Levenshtein distance and the Levenshtein algorithm in 1965, which measure the difference between two sequences and are widely used in spell-checking, bioinformatics, and computational linguistics. He passed away on September 6, 2017.