Neil Immerman (born 24 November 1953,

Manhasset, New York Manhasset is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) in Nassau County, on the North Shore of Long Island, in New York. It is considered the anchor community of the Greater Manhasset area. The population was 8,176 at the 2020 United States ce ...

) is an American

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 ...

, a professor of computer science at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, ...

.Faculty directory: Neil Immerman
Computer Science Department,

, retrieved 2010-01-23. He is one of the key developers of

descriptive complexity ''Descriptive Complexity'' is a book in mathematical logic and computational complexity theory by Neil Immerman. It concerns descriptive complexity theory, an area in which the expressibility of mathematical properties using different types of lo ...

, an approach he is currently applying to research in model checking, database theory, and computational complexity theory. Professor Immerman is an editor of the ''

SIAM Journal on Computing The ''SIAM Journal on Computing'' is a scientific journal focusing on the mathematical and formal aspects of computer science. It is published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Although its official ISO abbreviation is ...

'' and of ''

Logical Methods in Computer Science ''Logical Methods in Computer Science'' (LMCS) is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering theoretical computer science and applied logic. It opened to submissions on September 1, 2004. The editor-in-chief is Stefan Milius ( Fried ...

''. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees from

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 ...

in 1974 and his Ph.D. from

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 tea ...

in 1980 under the supervision of

Juris Hartmanis Juris Hartmanis (July 5, 1928 – July 29, 2022) was a Latvian-born American computer scientist and computational theorist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which establis ...

, a

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in comput ...

winner at Cornell. His book ''

Descriptive Complexity ''Descriptive Complexity'' is a book in mathematical logic and computational complexity theory by Neil Immerman. It concerns descriptive complexity theory, an area in which the expressibility of mathematical properties using different types of lo ...

'' appeared in 1999. Immerman is the winner, jointly with

Róbert Szelepcsényi Róbert Szelepcsényi (; born 19 August 1966, Žilina) is a Slovak computer scientist of Hungarian descent and a member of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University in Bratislava. His results on the closure of ...

, of the 1995

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 theoretical computer science for proof of what is known as the Immerman–Szelepcsényi theorem, the result that nondeterministic space

complexity class In computational complexity theory, a complexity class is a set (mathematics), set of computational problems of related resource-based computational complexity, complexity. The two most commonly analyzed resources are time complexity, time and spa ...

es are closed under complementation. Immerman is an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing * ...

and a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the a ...

.Neil Immerman
, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, retrieved 2010-01-23.

References

External links

Immerman's home page
at U. Mass. Amherst American computer scientists Cornell University alumni Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Gödel Prize laureates University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty Living people Theoretical computer scientists People from Manhasset, New York Scientists from New York (state) 1953 births {{compu-bio-stub