Michael Stewart Paterson, is a Britishcomputer scientist, who was the director of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) at theUniversity of Warwick until 2007, and chair of the department ofcomputer science in 2005.

He received hisDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from theUniversity of Cambridge in 1967, under the supervision ofDavid Park.^[1] He spent three years at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and moved to the University of Warwick in 1971, where he remainsProfessor Emeritus.^[2]

Paterson is an expert ontheoretical computer science with more than 100 publications, especially in the design and analysis ofalgorithms andcomputational complexity. Paterson's distinguished career was recognised with theEATCS Award in 2006, and a workshop in honour of his 66th birthday in 2008, including contributions of severalTuring Award andGödel Prize laureates. A further workshop was held in 2017 in honour of his 75th birthday, co-located with the workshop for the 10th anniversary of the DIMAP centre. For his work ondistributed computing withFischer andLynch, he received theDijkstra Prize in 2001, and his work with Dyer and Goldberg on counting graph homomorphisms received the best paper award at theICALP conference in 2006. Mike Paterson received aLester R. Ford Award in 2010.^[3] He is aFellow of the Royal Society since 2001 and been president of theEuropean Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). According to EATCS presidentMaurice Nivat, Paterson played a great role in the late 1960s in the recognition of computer science as a science, "and that theoretical computer science, which is very close to mathematics but distinct in its motivation and inspiration, is indeed a challenging and fruitful field of research."^[4]

Paterson is also an enthusiasticmountaineer.

• M. Dyer, L.A. Goldberg and M. Paterson, On counting homomorphisms to directed acyclic graphs, Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, Report TR05-121, Oct 2005.
• L.A. Goldberg, M. Jalsenius, R. Martin and M. Paterson, Improved mixing bounds for the anti-ferromagnetic Potts Model on Z², LMS J. Comput. Math. 9 (2006) 1–20.
• L.A. Goldberg, R. Martin and M. Paterson, Strong spatial mixing for lattice graphs with fewer colours,SICOMP, 35(2) 486–517 (2005).
• M. Albert and M. Paterson, Bounds for the growth rate of meander numbers, Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics, 2004,University of British Columbia (Vancouver B.C., Canada).
• L.A. Goldberg, M. Jerrum, S. Kannan and M. Paterson, A bound on the capacity of backoff and acknowledgement-based protocols, SICOMP, 88 (2004) 313–331.
• M. Adler, P. Berenbrink, T. Friedetzky, L.A. Goldberg, P. Goldberg and M. Paterson, A proportionate fair scheduling rule with good worst-case performance, Proc. of the 15th Annual ACMSymposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2003), 101–108 (2003).
• L.A. Goldberg, M. Jerrum and M. Paterson, The computational complexity of two-state spin systems, Random Structures and Algorithms, 23(2) 133–154 (2003).
• K. Iwama, A. Matsuura and M. Paterson, A family of NFAs which need 2ⁿ-alpha deterministic states,Theoretical Computer Science 301(1–3), 451–462 (2003).
• L.A. Goldberg, S. Kelk and M. Paterson, The complexity of choosing an H-colouring (nearly) uniformly at random, SICOMP, 33(2) 416–432 (2004) copyright SIAM.
• M. Paterson, H. Schroeder, O. Sykora and I. Vrto, On permutation communications in all-optical rings, Parallel Processing Letters 12(1), 23–29 (2002).

• Paterson's worms
• Sprouts (game)

• Official website, University of Warwick
• Workshop in Honour of Prof. Mike Paterson's 66th Birthday
• Workshop in Honour of Mike Paterson's 75th Birthday
• Mike Paterson atDBLP Bibliography Server

• Fellows of the Royal Society
• Living people
• British theoretical computer scientists
• Researchers in distributed computing
• Dijkstra Prize laureates
• 1942 births

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• EngvarB from July 2017
• Use dmy dates from July 2017
• Articles with hCards
• Official website not in Wikidata