Nancy Ann Lynch (born January 19, 1948) is a mathematician, a theorist, and a professor at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. She is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the EECS department and heads the "Theory of Distributed Systems" research group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Education and early life

Lynch was born in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, and her academic training was in mathematics. She attended

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

and MIT, where she received her

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

in 1972 under the supervision of

Albert R. Meyer Albert Ronald da Silva Meyer (born 1941) is Hitachi America Professor emeritus of computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Biography Meyer received his PhD from Harvard University in 1972 in applied mathematics, under t ...

Work

She served on the math and computer science faculty at several other universities, including

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...

, the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

Florida International University Florida International University (FIU) is a public university, public research university with its main campus in Miami-Dade County. Founded in 1965, the school opened its doors to students in 1972. FIU has grown to become the third-largest uni ...

, and the

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...

(Georgia Tech), prior to joining the MIT faculty in 1982. Since then, she has been working on applying mathematics to the tasks of understanding and constructing complex distributed systems. Her 1985 work with Michael J. Fischer and

Mike Paterson Michael Stewart Paterson, is a British computer scientist, who was the director of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) at the University of Warwick until 2007, and chair of the department of computer science in 2005 ...

on consensus problems received the PODC Influential-Paper Award in 2001. Their work showed that in an asynchronous distributed system, consensus is impossible if there is one processor that crashes. On their contribution, Jennifer Welch wrote that "this result has had a monumental impact in distributed computing, both theory and practice. Systems designers were motivated to clarify their claims concerning under what circumstances the systems work." She is the author of numerous research articles about distributed algorithms and impossibility results, and about formal modeling and validation of distributed systems (see, e.g., input/output automaton). She is the author of the graduate textbook "Distributed Algorithms". She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

, and an ACM Fellow.

Recognition

*1997:

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 ...

*2001: Dijkstra Paper Prize of PODC conference *2001: Elected a member of the

for the development of theoretical foundations for distributed computing. *2006: Van Wijngaarden Award *2007:

Knuth Prize The Donald E. Knuth Prize is a prize for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science, named after the American computer scientist Donald E. Knuth. History The Knuth Prize has been awarded since 1996 and includes an award of US ...

*2007: Dijkstra Paper Prize of PODC conference *2010:

IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

*2012: Athena Lecturer *2015:

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 Nati ...

Bibliography

References

External links

Nancy Lynch's home page at MIT
* * A series of invited lectures at PODC 2008 and CONCUR 2008. American computer scientists 1948 births Living people Researchers in distributed computing MIT School of Engineering faculty Georgia Tech faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery American women computer scientists Knuth Prize laureates Dijkstra Prize laureates Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Brooklyn College alumni Theoretical computer scientists 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences 21st-century American women {{US-academic-bio-stub