Tuesday, January 27, 2015

EATCS Award 2015 to Christos Papadimitriou

I am pleased to announce that the EATCS Awards Committee consisting of Fedor Fomin, Kim G. Larsen and Vladimiro Sassone (chair) has selected  Christos Papadimitriou (UC Berkeley, USA; WWW: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/; Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christos_Papadimitriou) as the recipient of the EATCS Award 2015. Congratulations to Christos!

The award, which is given to acknowledge extensive and widely recognized contributions to theoretical computer science over a life long scientific career, will be presented to Christos at ICALP 2015, which will be held in Kyoto, Japan, in the period 6-10 July 2015. The list of previous recipients of the EATCS Award is here. An official laudatio for the award is forthcoming. What follows is a short preliminary laudatio penned for this blog post.

Christos Papadimitriou’s body of work is of amazing breadth and depth, and has had a profound and lasting influence on many areas of Computer Science.

In an era of great specialization, Christos Papadimitriou stands out as a present-day Renaissance man. He is an intellectual who, citing the title of one of his essays, is not afraid of asking "big queries" and  applies the “computational lens” to shed light on important problems in several areas of scientific enquiry, ranging from economics to the theory of evolution. While doing what he might himself call “extroverted Computer Science”, he has contributed truly seminal work to a large number of fields within our subject, including algorithmics, complexity theory, computational game theory, database theory, internet and sensor nets, optimization and robotics.

Christos Papadimitriou is also one of the very best expositors and teachers within our field. He has written classic textbooks on the theory of computation, combinatorial optimization, database concurrency control, computational complexity and algorithms. In so doing, he has helped to inspire several generations of computer scientists.

If that wasn't enough, Christos Papadimitriou is a tireless expositor and is able to explain the beauty of our discipline to a general educated public. He is not afraid to cross boundaries, and to use literary forms such as novels (see "Turing: A Novel About Computation", http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/turing-novel-about-computation) and comics (see the graphic novel "Logicomix", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix) to offer accessible expositions of the science of computing and its origins.

To sum up, Christos Papadimitriou is one of those rare scientists who combines a large, influential and varied body of scientific results with the gifts of an inspiring teacher and of a great communicator.

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