Madhu Sudan | |
|---|---|
 Sudan atOberwolfach in 2015 | |
| Born | (1966-09-12)12 September 1966 (age 58) Chennai, India |
| Education | IIT Delhi (BTech) University of California, Berkeley (PhD) |
| Awards | Gödel Prize (2001) |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | Efficient Checking of Polynomials and Proofs and the Hardness of Approximation Problems (1992) |
| Doctoral advisor | Umesh Vazirani |
| Doctoral students | Venkatesan Guruswami Benjamin Rossman Ryan O'Donnell |
Madhu Sudan (born 12 September 1966)[1] is an Indian-Americancomputer scientist. He has been a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at theHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2015.
He received his bachelor's degree in computer science fromIIT Delhi in 1987[1] and his doctoral degree in computer science at theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1992.[1][2] The dissertation he wrote at the University of California, Berkeley is titledEfficient Checking of Polynomials and Proofs and the Hardness of Approximation Problems. He was a research staff member at theIBMThomas J. Watson Research Center inYorktown Heights, New York from 1992 to 1997 and became a researcher at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after that.[1] From 2009 to 2015 he was a permanent researcher atMicrosoft Research New England before joining theHarvard University faculty in 2015.[3]
In 1998, he received theSloan Research Fellowship.[4] He was awarded the RolfNevanlinna Prize at the 24thInternational Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2002. The prize recognizes outstanding work in themathematical aspects of computer science. Sudan was honored for his work in advancing the theory ofprobabilistically checkable proofs—a way to recast a mathematical proof in computer language for additional checks on its validity—and developingerror-correcting codes.[1] For the same work, he received theACM's Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1993 and theGödel Prize in 2001 and was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1998.[5] He is a Fellow of the ACM (2008).[6] In 2012 he became a fellow of theAmerican Mathematical Society.[7] In 2014 he won theInfosys Prize in the mathematical sciences.[8]In 2017 he was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences.[9]In 2021, he was awarded theIEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for 2022.[10]
Sudan has made important contributions to several areas of theoretical computer science, including probabilistically checkable proofs, non-approximability ofoptimization problems,list decoding, and error-correcting codes.[8]
