Eugene Prange

Eugene August Prange (July 30, 1917 – February 12, 2006)^[1][2] was an American coding theorist, a researcher at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory (AFCRL) in Massachusetts who "introduced many of the early fundamental ideas of algebraic coding theory"^[3] and was the first to investigate cyclic codes in 1957.^[4][5] With Andrew Gleason, he is the namesake of the Gleason–Prange theorem on the symmetries of the extended quadratic residue code.^[6]

Prange was born in Illinois to August Prange and Eugenia Livingston.^[7] He graduated from the University of Illinois and spent World War II serving his country in England as an intelligence officer. He then studied at Harvard University before joining AFCRL.^[2]