Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp was widely known for his work in computer science, coding theory and combinatorial game theory.

Coding theory is the study of the properties of codes and their respective fitness for specific applications. Codes are used for data compression, cryptography, error detection and correction, data transmission and data storage. Codes are studied by various scientific disciplines—such as information theory, electrical engineering, mathematics, linguistics, and computer science—for the purpose of designing efficient and reliable data transmission methods. This typically involves the removal of redundancy and the correction or detection of errors in the transmitted data.