Andrew Viterbi

Andrew James Viterbi was born in Bergamo, Italy in 1935 and emigrated to the United States as a child. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from MIT and his doctorate from the University of Southern California. Viterbi developed the Viterbi Algorithm in 1967 — a dynamic programming algorithm for decoding convolutional codes in noisy communication channels — which became one of the most widely implemented algorithms in digital communications history, used in cellular networks, deep-space probes, and digital television systems. He co-founded Linkabit with Irwin Jacobs in 1968 and was a founding member of Qualcomm in 1985, serving as the company's President and Chief Technical Officer.

Andrew Viterbi brought the deepest technical credentials of Qualcomm's founding team, combining elite academic training in communications theory with practical experience in defense and commercial digital systems. His role at Qualcomm was primarily technical and strategic rather than operational: as Chief Technical Officer and later as Vice Chairman, he helped ensure that Qualcomm's intellectual property development remained grounded in rigorous communication theory and that the company's patent filing strategy captured the full breadth of its technical innovations. The Viterbi Algorithm, which bears his name and is taught in virtually every electrical engineering curriculum globally, remains perhaps the single most consequential technical contribution to emerge from Qualcomm's founding circle. Viterbi was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2007 and the IEEE Medal of Honor, among numerous other distinctions. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering — named in honor of a $52 million gift from Andrew and Erna Viterbi — stands as a lasting monument to his contributions to the field.