Vladimir Levenshtein

Vladimir Levenshtein

Vladimir Iosifovich Levenshtein (Russian: Влади́мир Ио́сифович Левенште́йн; born 1935) is a Russian scientist who has done research in information theory, error-correcting codes, and combinatorial design. Among other contributions, he is known for the Levenshtein distance and a Levenshtein algorithm, which he developed in 1965.

He graduated from the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow State University in 1958 and has worked at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow ever since. He is a fellow of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

He received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2006, for “contributions to the theory of error-correcting codes and information theory, including the Levenshtein distance”.

There is a controversy in regard to the publication date of the paper where the Levenshtein distance was introduced. The original, Russian, version was published in 1965, but the translation appeared in 1966.