Madhu Sudan | |
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Born |
Chennai, India |
September 12, 1966
Alma mater |
IIT Delhi University of California, Berkeley |
Thesis | Efficient Checking of Polynomials and Proofs and the Hardness of Approximation Problems (1992) |
Doctoral advisor | Umesh Virkumar Vazirani |
Doctoral students | Mikhail Alekhnovitch Victor Chen Yevgeniy Dodis Elena Grigorescu Alan Guo Venkatesan Guruswami Prahladh Harsha Brendan Juba Swastik Kopparty April Lehman Eric Lehman Ryan O'Donnell Benjamin Rossman Shubhangi Saraf Adam Smith Sergey Yekhanin |
Notable awards |
Gödel Prize (2001) Nevanlinna Prize (2002) Infosys Prize (2014) |
Madhu Sudan (born September 12, 1966) is an Indian-American computer scientist. He has been a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2015.
He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Delhi in 1987 and his doctoral degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York from 1992 to 1997 and moved to MIT after that. From 2009 to 2015 he was a permanent researcher at Microsoft Research New England before joining Harvard University in 2015.
He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002. The prize recognizes outstanding work in the mathematical aspects of computer science. Sudan was honored for his work in advancing the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs—a way to recast a mathematical proof in computer language for additional checks on its validity—and developing error-correcting codes. For the same work, he received the ACM's Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1993 and the Gödel Prize in 2001. He is a Fellow of the ACM (2008). In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2014 he won the Infosys Prize in the mathematical sciences.