Posner was born on August 10, 1933, in
Brooklyn, and graduated from
Stuyvesant High School in 1950; at Stuyvesant, one of his close friends was mathematician
Paul Cohen. While a graduate student, he also visited
Bell Labs, and later claimed that he had been assigned to the desk there that had formerly been
Harry Nyquist's. at only 26 pages long, it held the record for the shortest doctoral thesis at the university. After finishing his studies, he became a mathematics instructor at the
University of Wisconsin and then an assistant professor of mathematics at
Harvey Mudd College. In 1961,
Solomon W. Golomb hired him to lead the Information Processing Group at JPL. He led the group for 10 years and then, after a sequence of positions in higher management, he became chief technologist in JPL's Office of Telecommunications and Data Acquisition in 1982. He also held lecturer and visiting faculty positions in the
applied mathematics and
electrical engineering departments of the
California Institute of Technology beginning in 1970. He died after being hit by a truck while bicycling to work on June 15, 1993. ==Contributions==