Charles Eric Leiserson is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

, specializing in the theory of parallel computing and distributed computing, and particularly practical applications thereof. As part of this effort, he developed the

Cilk Cilk, Cilk++, Cilk Plus and OpenCilk are general-purpose programming languages designed for multithreaded parallel computing. They are based on the C and C++ programming languages, which they extend with constructs to express parallel loops ...

multithreaded language. He invented the

fat-tree The fat tree network is a universal network for provably efficient communication. It was invented by Charles E. Leiserson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. k-ary n-trees, the type of fat-trees commonly used in most high-perf ...

interconnection network, a hardware-universal interconnection network used in many supercomputers, including the

Connection Machine A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...

CM5, for which he was network architect. He helped pioneer the development of VLSI theory, including the retiming method of digital optimization with James B. Saxe and systolic arrays with

H. T. Kung Hsiang-Tsung Kung (; born November 9, 1945) is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array ...

. He conceived of the notion of

cache-oblivious algorithm In computing, a cache-oblivious algorithm (or cache-transcendent algorithm) is an algorithm designed to take advantage of a processor cache without having the size of the cache (or the length of the cache lines, etc.) as an explicit parameter. An o ...

s, which are algorithms that have no tuning parameters for cache size or cache-line length, but nevertheless use cache near-optimally. He developed the

language for multithreaded programming, which uses a provably good work-stealing algorithm for scheduling. Leiserson coauthored the standard algorithms textbook '' Introduction to Algorithms'' together with

Thomas H. Cormen Thomas H. Cormen is the co-author of ''Introduction to Algorithms'', along with Charles Leiserson, Ron Rivest, and Cliff Stein. In 2013, he published a new book titled '' Algorithms Unlocked''. He is a professor of computer science at Dartmou ...

Ronald L. Rivest Ronald Linn Rivest (; born May 6, 1947) is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Int ...

, and

Clifford Stein Clifford Seth Stein (born December 14, 1965), a computer scientist, is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University in New York, NY, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Computer Scie ...

. Leiserson received a BS degree in computer science and mathematics from Yale University in 1975 and a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...

degree in computer science from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technolog ...

in 1981, where his advisors were Jon Bentley and

. He then joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is now a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

. In addition, he is a principal in the Theory of Computation research group in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and he was formerly director of research and director of system architecture for

Akamai Technologies Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery networkJ. Dilley, B. Maggs, J. Parikh, H. Prokop, R. Sitaraman, and B. Weihl. (CDN), cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services. Akamai's Inte ...

. He was Founder and chief technology officer of Cilk Arts, Inc., a start-up that developed

technology for multicore computing applications. ( Cilk Arts, Inc. was acquired by Intel in 2009.) Leiserson's dissertation, ''Area-Efficient VLSI Computation'', won the first

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is awarded annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to the authors of the best doctoral dissertations in computer science and computer engineering. The award is accompanied by a prize of US $20,000 ...

. In 1985, the National Science Foundation awarded him a

Presidential Young Investigator Award The Presidential Young Investigator Award (PYI) was awarded by the National Science Foundation of the United States Federal Government. The program operated from 1984 to 1991, and was replaced by the NSF Young Investigator (NYI) Awards and Presiden ...

. He is a Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

(ACM), the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsi ...

(AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He received the 2014 Taylor L. Booth Education Award from the

IEEE Computer Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operatio ...

"for worldwide computer science education impact through writing a best-selling algorithms textbook, and developing courses on algorithms and parallel programming." He received the 2014 ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for his "enduring influence on parallel computing systems and their adoption into mainstream use through scholarly research and development." He was also cited for "distinguished mentoring of computer science leaders and students." He received the 2013 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for "contributions to robust parallel and distributed computing."

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Home page
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Appearance on WMBR's

' radio show October 27, 2004 {{DEFAULTSORT:Leiserson, Charles American computer scientists Theoretical computer scientists Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Living people Researchers in distributed computing Yale University alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni 1953 births American chief technology officers

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