Frank Gray (13 September 1887 – 23 May 1969) was a physicist and researcher at Bell Labs who made numerous innovations in television, both mechanical and electronic, and is remembered for the Gray code.

The Gray code, or reflected binary code (RBC), appearing in Gray's 1953 patent, is a binary numeral system often used in electronics, but with many applications in mathematics.

Frank Gray derived the name RBC from the fact that it "may be built up from the conventional binary code by a sort of reflection process".

The Gray Code was invented to solve issues in electronics. The problem with natural binary codes is that it is very unlikely that physical switches will change states exactly in synchrony. This is because in the transition between two states, many bits might have to be shifted at once and in different positions. In the brief period while all are changing, the switches will read some spurious position. 

So, that's why Gray codes have the property that only one bit changes between successive numbers, which makes them useful for tasks such as error correction, digital display, and positional encoding.
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