Known for developing the relationship between information theory and statistics, Cover served as past President of the IEEE Information Theory Society and was a Fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and of the IEEE. In 1972 he received the Outstanding Paper Award in Information Theory for his paper Broadcast Channels; he was selected in 1990 as the Shannon Lecturer, regarded as the highest honor in information theory; in 1997 he received the Richard W. Hamming Medal; and in 2003 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Author of 120 technical papers, Cover was coauthor of the book Elements of Information Theory, which became the most widely used textbook as an introduction to the topic following the publication of its first edition in 1991. He was also a coeditor of the book Open Problems in Communication and Computation.
