Daniel Alan Spielman (born March 1970 in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; (Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, Ma ...

Brief bio
/ref>) has been a professor of

applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathemat ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

since 2006. As of 2018, he is the

Sterling Professor Sterling Professor, the highest academic rank at Yale University, is awarded to a tenured faculty member considered the best in his or her field. It is akin to the rank of university professor at other universities. The appointment, made by the ...

of Computer Science at Yale. He is also the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, since its founding, and chair of the newly established Department of Statistics and Data Science.

Education

Daniel Spielman attended The Philadelphia School, and Germantown Friends School. He received his bachelor of arts degree in mathematics and computer science from Yale University in 1992 and a PhD in applied mathematics from MIT in 1995 (his dissertation was called "Computationally Efficient Error-Correcting Codes and Holographic Proofs"). He taught in the Mathematics Department at MIT from 1996 to 2005.

Awards

Spielman and his collaborator

Shang-Hua Teng Shang-Hua Teng (; born 1964) is a Chinese-American computer scientist. He is the Seeley G. Mudd Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Southern California. Previously, he was the chairman of the Computer Science Depart ...

have jointly won the

Gödel Prize The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Intere ...

twice: in 2008 for their work on

smoothed analysis In theoretical computer science, smoothed analysis is a way of measuring the complexity of an algorithm. Since its introduction in 2001, smoothed analysis has been used as a basis for considerable research, for problems ranging from mathematica ...

of algorithms and in 2015 for their work on nearly-linear-time Laplacian solvers. In 2010 he was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize "for smoothed analysis of Linear Programming, algorithms for graph-based codes and applications of

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of '' graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conn ...

to Numerical Computing" and the same year he was named 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 member ...

. In 2012 he was part of the inaugural class of Simons Investigators providing $660,000 for five years for curiosity driven research. In October 2012, he was named a recipient of the

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

. In 2013, together with Adam Marcus and Nikhil Srivastava, he provided a positive solution to the Kadison–Singer problem, a result that was awarded the 2014 Pólya Prize. He gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010. In 2017 he was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

. In 2022 he won the

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an annual award of the Breakthrough Prize series announced in 2013. It is funded by Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg and others. The annual award comes with a cash gift of $3 million. The Breakthrough Priz ...

"for breakthrough contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics, including to

spectral graph theory In mathematics, spectral graph theory is the study of the properties of a graph in relationship to the characteristic polynomial, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors of matrices associated with the graph, such as its adjacency matrix or Laplacian mat ...

, the Kadison-Singer problem, numerical linear algebra, optimization, and coding theory.".

References

External links

Yale faculty homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Spielman, Daniel 1970 births Living people Mathematicians from Philadelphia American computer scientists Researchers in geometric algorithms MacArthur Fellows Gödel Prize laureates Nevanlinna Prize laureates Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Scientists from Pennsylvania Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Yale University faculty Yale Sterling Professors Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Yale University alumni Jewish American scientists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Simons Investigator Germantown Friends School alumni 21st-century American Jews Theoretical computer scientists