Martin Edward Dyer (born 16 July 1946 in

Ryde, Isle of Wight Ryde is an English seaside town and civil parish on the north-east coast of the Isle of Wight. The built-up area had a population of 23,999 according to the 2011 Census and an estimate of 24,847 in 2019. Its growth as a seaside resort came af ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

) is 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 the School of Computing at the

University of Leeds , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

Leeds Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by populati ...

. He graduated from the

in 1967, obtained his MSc from

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

in 1968 and his PhD from the

in 1979. His research interests lie in

theoretical computer science Theoretical 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 circumsc ...

discrete optimization Discrete optimization is a branch of optimization in applied mathematics and computer science. Scope As opposed to continuous optimization, some or all of the variables used in a discrete mathematical program are restricted to be discrete variab ...

and

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many appl ...

. Currently, he focuses on the complexity of counting and the efficiency of Markov chain algorithms for approximate counting.

Key contributions

Four key contributions made by Martin Dyer are: #polynomial time algorithm for approximating the volume of

convex bodies In mathematics, a convex body in n-dimensional Euclidean space \R^n is a compact convex set with non-empty interior. A convex body K is called symmetric if it is centrally symmetric with respect to the origin; that is to say, a point x lies in ...

(with Alan Frieze and

Ravindran Kannan Ravindran Kannan ( ta, ரவீந்திரன் கண்ணன்; born 12 March 1953, Madras) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he leads the algorithms research group. He is also the first adjunct faculty of ...

) #linear programming in fixed dimensions #the path coupling method for proving mixing of Markov chains (with Russ Bubley) #complexity of counting constraint satisfaction problems

Awards and honours

In 1991, Professor Dyer received the

Fulkerson Prize The Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of $1,500 each are presented at e ...

in Discrete Mathematics (Jointly with Alan Frieze and Ravi Kannan for the paper "A random polynomial time algorithm for approximating the volume of convex bodies" in the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery) awarded by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Programming Society. In 2021 he was awarded the Godel Prize for the paper "An Effective Dichotomy for the Counting Constraint Satisfaction Problem." SIAM J. Computing. 42(3): 1245-1274 (2013) (Jointly with David Richerby) which is sponsored jointly by the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science and ACM SIGACT. (Other contemporaneous recipients were Andrei Bulatov, Jin-Yi Cai,

Xi Chen Xi Chen (Chinese: 陈汐) is a computer scientist. He is an associate professor of computer science at Columbia University. Chen won the 2021 Gödel Prize and Fulkerson Prize for his co-authored paper "Complexity of Counting CSP with Complex Weigh ...

.) In 2013, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) Awards Committee, consisting of Leslie Ann Goldberg, Vladimiro Sassone and Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide (chair), unanimously decided to give the EATCS Award to Professor Martin Dyer.

Personal

Martin Dyer is married to Alison. They have two adult children.

References

External links

Martin Dyer's webpage

Fulkerson prize-winning paper
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dyer, Martin English computer scientists Living people Academics of the University of Leeds Theoretical computer scientists 1946 births Alumni of Imperial College London