2nd Director of the National Reconnaissance Office
In office March 1, 1963[1] – October 1, 1965[2]
President
John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson
Preceded by
Joseph V. Charyk
Succeeded by
Alexander H. Flax
Personal details
Born
(1915-03-30)March 30, 1915 Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Died
December 3, 2016(2016-12-03) (aged 101) Sedgwick, Maine, U.S.
Alma mater
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Occupation
Scientist, government official
Brockway McMillan (March 30, 1915 – December 3, 2016) was an American government official and scientist, who served as the eighth Under Secretary of the Air Force and the second Director of the National Reconnaissance Office.
McMillan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1915, the only child of Franklin Richardson McMillan, a civil engineer, and Luvena Lucille Brockway McMillan, a schoolteacher.[3] He received his B.S. in 1936 and a Ph.D. 1939 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a thesis entitled The calculus of discrete homogenous chaos supervised by Norbert Wiener.[4] He also served in the U.S. Navy at Dahlgren and Los Alamos during World War II. He joined Bell Telephone Laboratories 1946 as a research mathematician and published the article "The Basic Theorems of Information Theory"[5] and proved parts of Kraft's inequality, sometimes called the Kraft-McMillan theorem (Kraft proved that if the inequality is satisfied, then a prefix code exists with the given lengths. McMillan showed that unique decodeability implies that the inequality holds.)[6]
McMillan served as the President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) 1959-1960.[7]
McMillan became assistant director of systems engineering in 1955 and was named director of military research in 1959. From 1961 to 1965 he was with the U.S. Air Force as assistant secretary for research and development and then undersecretary of the Air Force. He rejoined Bell Labs in 1965 and retired in 1979 as vice-president for military development. He was an IEEE Fellow, past president of SIAM, and member of several mathematical organizations.[8]
McMillan promoted the development of a second generation of reconnaissance satellites: the KH-5 Argon (produced 1961–65) satellite mapping system, and KH-6 Lanyard (in use 1963), the first attempt to acquire higher resolutions imagery. He advocated maintaining the National Reconnaissance Office as the primary United States agency in space reconnaissance.
[9]
In 1942, while at Princeton University, McMillan married Elizabeth Audrey Wishard (1915–2008) who had a PhD in mathematics from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Boston, in 1938.[10] He died on December 3, 2016, at his home in Sedgwick, Maine at the age of 101.[11]
^Laurie, Clayton. Leaders of the National Reconnaissance Office 1961-2001. Office of the Historian, National Reconnaissance Office, May 1, 2002.
^"Directors of the National Reconnaissance Office at 50 Years" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-10-14. Retrieved 2012-10-16.
^Marquis Who's Who on the Web
^Brockway McMillan at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
^McMillan, The Basic Theorems of Information Theory, Annals of Mathematical Statistics, Volume 24, Number 2 (1953), 196-219.
^McMillan, B. (1956) Two inequalities implied by unique decipherability.IRE Trans. Inform. Theory 2: p.115-116
^"Anecdotes:The Origin of the Word Bit", Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 6, Number 2, April 1984
^"National Reconnaissance Office: Brockway McMillan official biography" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-10-07. Retrieved 2012-10-16.
^Green, Judy; LaDuke, Jeanne (2008). Pioneering Women in American Mathematics — The Pre-1940 PhD's. History of Mathematics. Vol. 34 (1st ed.). American Mathematical Society, The London Mathematical Society. ISBN 978-0-8218-4376-5. See p.244. Elizabeth Audrey Wishard biography on p.409-411 of the Supplementary Material at AMS
BrockwayMcMillan (March 30, 1915 – December 3, 2016) was an American government official and scientist, who served as the eighth Under Secretary of the...
{\displaystyle (\Omega ,B,p)} . The Shannon–McMillan–Breiman theorem, due to Claude Shannon, BrockwayMcMillan, and Leo Breiman, states that we have convergence...
included John Tukey and Los Alamos veterans Donald Ling and BrockwayMcMillan. Shannon, Ling, McMillan and Hamming came to call themselves the Young Turks. "We...
March 28 – Jeremy Hutchinson, British lawyer, peer (d. 2017) March 30 BrockwayMcMillan, American government official and scientist (d. 2016) Arsenio Erico...
Force and the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), BrockwayMcMillan, asked the director of NRO Program A (the component of NRO responsible...
(1955–1956) Thomas Southard (1956–1958) Donald Thomsen, Jr. (1958–1959) BrockwayMcMillan (1959–1960) F. Joachim Weyl (1960–1961) Robert Rinehart (1961–1962)...
Charyk (1920–2016) January 28, 1960 March 1, 1963 3 years, 32 days 8 BrockwayMcMillan (1915–2016) June 12, 1963 September 30, 1965 2 years, 110 days 9 Norman...
Dr. BrockwayMcMillan March 1, 1963 – October 1, 1965 Kennedy/Johnson Dr. Alexander H. Flax October 1, 1965 – March 17, 1969 Johnson Dr. John L. McLucas...
Barques Township with 15 residents. The largest municipality by land area is McMillan Township which spans 588.78 sq mi (1,524.9 km2), while Ahmeek is the smallest...
television roles on Mission: Impossible, Adam-12, CHiPs, Night Gallery, McMillan & Wife, and Phyllis. She had a role opposite Richard Widmark in the 1973...
Area High School Indiana County Technology Center Brockway Area Junior/Senior High School, Brockway Brookville Area Jr./Sr. High School, Brookville Christ's...
Corrigan, by Chris Ware (Pantheon) 2002 Spirit Archives designed by Amie Brockway-Metcalf (DC) 2003 Krazy and Ignatz, designed by Chris Ware (Fantagraphics...
Mark Boucher (born 1976), wicket-keeper and right-handed batsman Charles Brockway (1907–1985), slow left-arm orthodox bowler David Callaghan (born 1965)...
Ruth Alice Armstrong, non-fiction writer (born in Cassopolis) Ella H. Brockway Avann, religious writer (born in Newaygo) Catharine H. T. Avery, editor...
Preserve Bastile Lake Battle Bluff Prairie Battle Creek Hemlocks Bauer-Brockway Barrens Baxter's Hollow Bay City Mine Bayshore Blufflands Bean Lake Bear...
Preserve Bastile Lake Battle Bluff Prairie Battle Creek Hemlocks Bauer-Brockway Barrens Baxter's Hollow Bay City Mine Bayshore Blufflands Bean Lake Bear...
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