David Steurer is a German

theoretical computer scientist computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumscribe the th ...

, working in

approximation algorithms In computer science and operations research, approximation algorithms are efficient algorithms that find approximate solutions to optimization problems (in particular NP-hard problems) with provable guarantees on the distance of the returned solut ...

hardness of approximation In computer science, hardness of approximation is a field that studies the algorithmic complexity of finding near-optimal solutions to optimization problems. Scope Hardness of approximation complements the study of approximation algorithms by prov ...

, sum of squares, and

high-dimensional statistics In statistical theory, the field of high-dimensional statistics studies data whose dimension is larger than typically considered in classical multivariate analysis. The area arose owing to the emergence of many modern data sets in which the dimensi ...

. He is an associate professor of computer science at

ETH Zurich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , ac ...

Biography

David Steurer studied for a bachelor's degree at the

University of Saarland Saarland University (german: Universität des Saarlandes, ) is a public research university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in s ...

(2003–2006), and went on to study at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

, where he obtained his PhD under the supervision of

Sanjeev Arora Sanjeev Arora (born January 1968) is an Indian American theoretical computer scientist. Life He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2002–03. In 2008 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Mac ...

at 2010. He then spend two years as a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England, before joining

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

. In 2017 he moved to

, where he became an associate professor in 2020.

Work

Steurer's work focuses on optimization using the sum of squares technique, giving an invited talk on the topic at the 2018 ICM, together with Prasad Raghavendra. Together with Prasad Raghavendra, he developed the

small set expansion hypothesis The small set expansion hypothesis or small set expansion conjecture in computational complexity theory is an unproven computational hardness assumption. Under the small set expansion hypothesis it is assumed to be computationally infeasible to d ...

, for which they won the Michael and Shiela Held Prize. Together with James Lee and Prasad Raghavendra, he showed that in some settings, the sum-of-squares hierarchy is the most general kind of SDP hierarchy. Together with

Irit Dinur Irit Dinur (Hebrew: אירית דינור) is an Israeli mathematician. She is professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research is in foundations of computer science and in combinatorics, and especially in probabil ...

, he introduced a new and simple approach to parallel repetition theorems.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Raghavendra, Prasad Indian computer scientists Indian mathematicians Living people University of Washington alumni 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians University of California, Berkeley faculty 1984 births Cornell University faculty