Alain Glavieux

In 1993, at a conference in Geneva, three researchers from France's Brittany region presented a paper with an audacious title: near Shannon limit error-correcting coding and decoding. Alain Glavieux, Claude Berrou and Punya Thitimajshima described a new method, which they called turbo codes, that allowed digital signals to be transmitted with almost no errors, close to the theoretical maximum that the mathematician Claude Shannon had described in 1948. Many experts initially doubted the results. Within a decade, turbo codes were used in mobile phone networks and in communication with spacecraft.

He was born on July 4, 1949, in Paris, late in the evening, at an hour recorded in astrological collections. His Sun is in Cancer in the fourth house, the most private and foundational part of a chart. Cancer is patient and protective, and the fourth house concerns roots and inner life. Glavieux was known as a modest, dedicated academic who spent his career at the same institution, the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne in Brest.

Mercury and Mars are both in Gemini, in his third house of communication, messages and signals. Gemini is the sign of information and exchange, and the third house governs how messages travel from one place to another. Few placements could describe more literally a man whose life's work was making transmitted messages reliable.

Saturn in Virgo, in his sixth house of technical work and daily discipline, describes meticulous, patient labor. Virgo is the sign of precision and analysis, and Saturn there suits an engineer working on the mathematics of error correction, where every bit matters. Pluto in Leo also falls in the sixth house, adding intensity and a capacity for transformative work.

His Moon is in Scorpio, placed in the seventh house of collaborators, with Neptune in Libra there too. Turbo codes were a collaborative invention, and Glavieux's long partnership with Berrou was central to it.

His Ascendant in Pisces lends a gentle, intuitive and imaginative quality. The turbo decoding idea, in which two decoders exchange information back and forth to refine their guesses, was a creative leap as much as a mathematical one.

Jupiter, retrograde at the very end of Capricorn, lies in his eleventh house of professional networks and recognition. In 1998 the inventors received the Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society, and in 2003 Glavieux and Berrou received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, one of the highest honors in the field, as well as a major prize from the French Academy of Sciences.

He died of illness on September 25, 2004, at fifty-five. The Gemini planets in his third house made him a master of messages; the Saturn in Virgo made the work exact.