In January 1992 MacKay was appointed the
Royal Society Smithson Research Fellow at
Darwin College, Cambridge, continuing his cross-disciplinary research in the
Cavendish Laboratory, the Department of Physics of the University of Cambridge. In 1995 he was made a University Lecturer in the Cavendish Laboratory. He was promoted in 1999 to a Readership, in 2003 to a Professorship in
Natural Philosophy and in 2013 to the post of
Regius Professorship of Engineering.[20]
His interests beyond research included the development of effective teaching methods and African development; he taught regularly at the
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in
Cape Town from its foundation in 2003 to 2006. In 2008 he completed a book on energy consumption and energy production without
fossil fuels called Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air. MacKay used £10,000 of his own money to publish the book, and the initial print run of 5,000 sold within days.[30] The book received praise from The Economist,[31]The Guardian,[30] and
Bill Gates, who called it "one of the best books on energy that has been written."[32][33] Like his textbook on Information theory, MacKay made the book available for free online.[34] In March 2012 he gave a
TED talk on
renewable energy.[35]
David MacKay introduced more efficient types of
error-correcting code that are now used in satellite communications, digital broadcasting and magnetic recording. He advanced the field of Machine Learning by providing a sound Bayesian foundation for
artificial neural networks. Using this foundation, he significantly improved their performance, allowing them to be used for designing new types of steel that are now used in power stations. He used his expertise in information theory to design a widely used interface called "
dasher" that allows disabled people to write efficiently using a single finger or head-mounted pointer."[2]
He married Ramesh Ghiassi in 2011.[4] They had a son and a daughter.[11]
Illness and death
MacKay was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer (malignant
adenocarcinoma) in July 2015,[3] for which he underwent palliative chemotherapy, a process he documented in detail on his public personal blog.[40][41] He died in the afternoon of 14 April 2016.[42][43][44][45] He is survived by his wife and two children.[11]
References
^
abcAnon (2009).
"Sir David MacKay FRS". London:
Royal Society. Archived from
the original on 17 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
^David MacKay (7 February 2010).
"Biography – David J.C. MacKay". web homepage. University of Cambridge. Archived from
the original on 16 April 2016. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
^
abMacKay, D. J. C.; Neal, R. M. (1996). "Near Shannon limit performance of low density parity check codes". Electronics Letters. 32 (18): 1645.
Bibcode:
1996ElL....32.1645M.
doi:
10.1049/el:19961141.