Brockway McMillan is a retired American government official and scientist, who served as the eighth Under Secretary of the Air Force and the second Director of the National Reconnaissance Office.
Education
McMillan received his Bachelor of Surgery in 1936 and a Doctor of Philosophy 1939 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on a thesis entitled The calculus of discrete homogenous chaos supervised by Norbert Wiener.
Career
He also served in the United States. Navy at Dahlgren and Los Alamos during World World War World War II He joined Bell Telephone Laboratories 1946 as a research mathematician and published the article "The Basic Theorems of Information Theory" and proved parts of Kraft"s inequality, sometimes called the Kraft-McMillan theorem (Kraft proved that if the inequality is satisfied, then a prefix code exists with the given lengths McMillan the converse, that unique decodeability implies that the inequality holds)
McMillan served as the President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) 1959-1960. McMillan became assistant director of systems engineering in 1955 and was named director of military research in 1959. From 1961 to 1965 he was with the United States. Air Force as assistant secretary for research and development and then undersecretary of the Air Force.
He rejoined Bell Labs in 1965 and retired in 1979 as vice-president for military development.
McMillan promoted the development of a second generation of reconnaissance satellites: the KH-5 Argon (produced 1961-1965) satellite mapping system, and KH-6 Lanyard (in use 1963), the first attempt to acquire higher resolutions imagery. He advocated maintaining the National Reconnaissance Office as the primary United States agency in space reconnaissance.
In 1942, while at Princeton University, Brockway married Audrey Wishard (–2008) who had a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics from Radcliff College in Cambridge, Boston, in 1938.
Membership
He is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, past president of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and member of several mathematical organizations.