Wyner was born in the
Bronx,
New York. In 1955, he graduated from the
Bronx High School of Science, and in 1960 completed a five-year joint engineering program with
Queens College of the
City University of New York and
Columbia University. In 1963 he received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from
Columbia University for a thesis that worked out the algebra for
convolutional codes. After a summer job at the IBM
Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Wyner joined
Bell Laboratories at
Murray Hill, New Jersey, as a member of the technical staff. In 1974 he became head of its Communications Analysis Research Department and led it until 1993, when he became a researcher in the information theory department. His research included
coding theory,
optical communications,
cryptography, and
stochastic process. In a 1975 paper, he introduced the "wire-tap channel", showing how one could obtain "perfect secrecy" when a receiver enjoys a better channel than does the wire-tapping opponent. == Honors and awards ==