Known principally for his work in information theory and the invention of Shannon-Fano coding, Fano was a computer scientist and professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the early 1960s, he was involved in the development of time-sharing computers, and served as director of MIT's Project MAC from its founding in 1963 until 1968.
He received his S.B. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1941, before joining the staff of the MIT Radiation Laboratory. After the war, Fano received an Sc.D., also from MIT, in 1947; his thesis, entitled "Theoretical Limitations on the Broadband Matching of Arbitrary Impedances," was supervised by Ernst Guillemin. He joined the MIT faculty in 1947. Between 1950 and 1953, he led the Radar Techniques Group at Lincoln Laboratory.
