Madhu Sudan (born 12 September 1966) is an

Indian-American Indian Americans or Indo-Americans are citizens of the United States with ancestry from India. The United States Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Native Americans, who have also historically been referred to ...

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.

Career

He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from

IIT Delhi The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi is a public institute of technology located in New Delhi, India. It is one of the 23 IITs created to be Centres of Excellence for training, research and development in science, engineering and technolo ...

in 1987 and his doctoral degree in computer science at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1992. He was a research staff member at the IBM

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and wit ...

Yorktown Heights, New York Yorktown Heights is a census-designated place (CDP) in the town of Yorktown in Westchester County, New York, United States. The population was 1,781 at the 2010 census. History Yorktown Heights is in the town of Yorktown, New York, in northern ...

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 Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

in 2015.

Research contribution and awards

He was awarded the Rolf

Nevanlinna Prize The IMU Abacus Medal, known before 2022 as the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, is awarded once every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), for outstanding contributions in Mathemati ...

at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2002. The prize recognizes outstanding work in the

mathematical Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

aspects of computer science. Sudan was honored for his work in advancing the theory of

probabilistically checkable proof In computational complexity theory, a probabilistically checkable proof (PCP) is a type of proof that can be checked by a randomized algorithm using a bounded amount of randomness and reading a bounded number of bits of the proof. The algorithm is ...

s—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 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 Interes ...

in 2001 and was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1998. He is a Fellow of the ACM (2008). In 2012 he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

. In 2014 he won the

Infosys Prize The Infosys Prize is an annual award given to scientists, researchers, engineers and social scientists of Indian origin (not necessarily born in India) by the Infosys Science Foundation and ranks among the highest monetary awards in India to r ...

in the mathematical sciences.Madhu Sudan
Infosys Prize Laureates, retrieved 2015-02-28. In 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.National Academy of Sciences Members and Foreign Associates Elected
National Academy of Sciences, 2 May 2017. In 2021 he was awarded the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for 2021. Sudan has made important contributions to several areas of theoretical computer science, including probabilistically checkable proofs, non-approximability of

optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfi ...

problems,

list decoding In coding theory, list decoding is an alternative to unique decoding of error-correcting codes for large error rates. The notion was proposed by Elias in the 1950s. The main idea behind list decoding is that the decoding algorithm instead of outpu ...

, and error-correcting codes.

References

External links

DBLP: Madhu SudanMadhu Sudan's Home PageBio from the Microsoft Research New England page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sudan, Madhu 1966 births Living people Indian computer scientists Indian emigrants to the United States American computer scientists Theoretical computer scientists 20th-century Indian mathematicians University of California, Berkeley alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Gödel Prize laureates Nevanlinna Prize laureates American people of Indian Tamil descent Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the American Mathematical Society IIT Delhi alumni Scientists from Chennai American academics of Indian descent Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty Simons Investigator Indian American American people of Indian descent