This series is named in honor of the late Jack Keil Wolf, who joined the faculty at UC San Diego in 1984 and served as a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in the Jacobs School of Engineering. He held an endowed chair at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR), where he led the Signal Processing Group, dubbed the “Wolf Pack.” “It’s hard to overstate Jack’s role in getting the information theory community interested in data storage,” said Paul Siegel, an ECE professor and former director of CMRR. “When you save data on a hard disk, the magnetic medium is imperfect. Jack’s innovations have allowed us to write and read data from these magnetic devices with near-perfect fidelity. This is at the heart of the information revolution,” said Lawrence Larson, Founding Dean of the School of Engineering at Brown University. “Jack was one of the deepest thinkers in terms of how you take information – ones and zeros – and make it so it can be stored or transmitted without losing its fidelity.” In honor of Jack K. Wolf, Professor Henry D. Pfister from Duke University will be giving a lecture titled “Insight from Simple Questions: Three Examples.” ABSTRACT: This talk covers three research problems I have considered and their relationship to Jack Wolf’s work. Each topic is motivated by a simple question whose answer provided some insight into a deeper question. First, the connection between Prony’s method and algebraic decoding (described by Wolf in 1967) will be used to motivate the question: Can one compute the amplitude and frequency of 2 complex sinusoids using only 3 samples, and what does this mean for error correction? Next, a multi-user detection problem for wireless communication will be used to motivate the question: How can cellular systems with successive cancellation approach the equal-rate point of the multiple-access with equal-power users? Finally, the close connection between Polar codes and Reed-Muller codes motivated the question: Can Reed-Muller codes achieve capacity? The format of this talk was motivated by Jack Wolf’s penchant for asking simple playful questions that contain the essence of a deeper problem. This style makes research fun and helps keep students engaged. Of course, selecting the right question is more art than science.