Erdal Arıkan

Erdal Arıkan (born 1958) is a Turkish professor in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. He is known for his invention of polar codes, which is a key component of 5G technologies.

Early life and education
The son of a doctor and a homemaker, Erdal Arikan was born in 1958 and grew up in Turkey. He attended the Middle East Technical University to study electrical engineering, but transferred to California Institute of Technology in the middle of his freshman year as a result of political violence in Turkey. He started graduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981 where he was advised by Robert G. Gallager and obtained his PhD in 1986.

Academic background
Arıkan briefly served as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined Bilkent University as a faculty member in 1987.

Arıkan developed polar codes, a system of coding that provides a mathematical basis for the solution of Shannon's channel capacity problem. He presented a three-session lecture on the polar codes at Simons Institute's Information Theory Boot Camp at the University of California, Berkeley. The lecture is also featured on the Simons Institute webpage, which includes the slides used by Arıkan in his presentation.

Arıkan is an IEEE Fellow (Class of 2012), and was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for 2014–2015.

Awards
Arıkan received the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award in 2010, and the Sedat Simavi Science Award for the construction of new channel coding schemes. Arıkan became the recipient of the Kadir Has Achievement Award in 2011 for the same accomplishment. He was named an IEEE fellow in 2012.

Arıkan received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Award in 2018 "for contributions to information and communications theory, especially the discovery of polar codes and polarization techniques." The same year, it was announced that he would be honored with the 2019 Claude E. Shannon Award.

The Chinese telecommunications company Huawei recognized his "outstanding contribution to the development of communications technology in 2018."