Rodney Graham Downey (born 20 September 1957) is a New Zealand and Australian mathematician and computer scientist,. a professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at

Victoria University of Wellington Victoria University of Wellington ( mi, Te Herenga Waka) is a university in Wellington, New Zealand. It was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a constituent college of the University of New Zealand. The university is well kno ...

in New Zealand.Faculty profile
Victoria University of Wellington, retrieved 19 February 2012. He is known for his work in

mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of logic, formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of for ...

and

computational complexity theory In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and relating these classes to each other. A computational problem is a task solved by ...

, and in particular for founding the field of parameterised complexity together with

Michael Fellows Michael Ralph Fellows AC HFRSNZ MAE (born June 15, 1952 in Upland, California) is a computer scientist and the Elite Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Bergen, Norway as of January 2016. Biogra ...

Biography

Downey earned a bachelor's degree at the

University of Queensland , mottoeng = By means of knowledge and hard work , established = , endowment = A$224.3 million , budget = A$2.1 billion , type = Public research university , chancellor = Peter Varghese , vice_chancellor = Deborah Terry , city = B ...

in 1978, and then went on to graduate school at

Monash University Monash University () is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Named for prominent World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The university has a ...

, earning a doctorate in 1982 under the supervision of

John Crossley John Crossley (16 May 1812 – 16 April 1879) was a Liberal Party politician in the United Kingdom. He served from 1874 to 1877 as MP for Halifax in West Yorkshire. He was the eldest son of John Crossley (1772–1837) and his wife Martha Turn ...

.Curriculum vitae
retrieved 19 February 2012. After holding teaching and visiting positions at the

Chisholm Institute of Technology Monash University, Caulfield campus is a campus of Monash University located in Caulfield East, which is a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, in the state of Victoria. The campus comprises 13,400 students of which 52.8% are female and 57.1% of st ...

Western Illinois University Western Illinois University (WIU) is a public university in Macomb, Illinois. It was founded in 1899 as Western Illinois State Normal School. As the normal school grew, it became Western Illinois State Teachers College. History Western Illin ...

, the

National University of Singapore The National University of Singapore (NUS) is a national public research university in Singapore. Founded in 1905 as the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States Government Medical School, NUS is the oldest autonomous university in the c ...

, and the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

, he came to New Zealand in 1986 as a lecturer at Victoria University. He was promoted to reader in 1991, and was given a personal chair at Victoria in 1995. Downey was president of the

New Zealand Mathematical Society The New Zealand Mathematical Society is a New Zealand based learned society of mathematicians. It is listed by the Royal Society of New Zealand as the affiliate organisation responsible for mathematics research, and by the International Mathematical ...

from 2001 to 2003.

Publications

Downey is the co-author of five books: *''Parameterized Complexity'' (with

, Springer, 1999) *''Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity'' (with D. Hirschfeldt, Springer, 2010) *''Fundamentals of Parameterized Complexity'' (with

, Springer, 2013) *''Minimal Weak Truth Table Degrees and Computably Enumerable Turing Degrees'' (with Keng Meng Ng and David Reed Solomon, Memoirs American Mathematical Society, Vol. 2184, 2020) *''A Hierarchy of Turing Degrees'' (with Noam Greenberg, Annals of Mathematics Studies No. 206, Princeton University Press, 2020) He is also the author or co-author of over 200 research papers, including a highly cited sequence of four papers with Michael Fellows and Karl Abrahamson setting the foundation for the study of parameterised complexity.

Awards and honours

In 1990, Downey won the Hamilton Research Award from the

Royal Society of New Zealand Royal may refer to: People * Royal (name), a list of people with either the surname or given name * A member of a royal family Places United States * Royal, Arkansas, an unincorporated community * Royal, Illinois, a village * Royal, Iowa, a cit ...

. In 1992, Downey won the Research Award of the New Zealand Mathematical Society "for penetrating and prolific investigations that have made him a leading expert in many aspects of recursion theory, effective algebra and complexity". In 1994, he won the New Zealand Association of Scientists Research Award, and became a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1996. In 2006, he became the first New Zealand-based mathematician to give an Invited Lecture at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

. He has also given invited lectures at the International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and the ACM Conference on Computational Complexity. He was elected as 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 * ...

in 2007 "for contributions to computability and complexity theory", becoming the second ACM Fellow in New Zealand, and in the same year was elected as a fellow of the

. In 2010 he won the Shoenfield Prize (for articles) of the

Association for Symbolic Logic The Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) is an international organization of specialists in mathematical logic and philosophical logic. The ASL was founded in 1936, and its first president was Alonzo Church. The current president of the ASL is ...

for his work with Denis Hirschfeldt, Andre Nies, and Sebastiaan Terwijn on

randomness In common usage, randomness is the apparent or actual lack of pattern or predictability in events. A random sequence of events, symbols or steps often has no order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Individual rand ...

. In 2011, the Royal Society of New Zealand gave him their

Hector Medal The Hector Medal, formerly known as the Hector Memorial Medal, is a science award given by the Royal Society Te Apārangi in memory of Sir James Hector to researchers working in New Zealand. It is awarded annually in rotation for different science ...

"for his outstanding, internationally acclaimed work in recursion theory, computational complexity, and other aspects of mathematical logic and combinatorics." 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 2013, he became a Fellow of the

Australian Mathematical Society The Australian Mathematical Society (AustMS) was founded in 1956 and is the national society of the mathematics profession in Australia. One of the Society's listed purposes is to promote the cause of mathematics in the community by representing ...

. In 2014, he was awarded the

Nerode Prize The EATCS–IPEC Nerode Prize is a theoretical computer science prize awarded for outstanding research in the area of multivariate algorithmics. It is awarded by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and the International Sym ...

from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, jointly with

Hans Bodlaender Hans Leo Bodlaender (born April 21, 1960) is a Dutch computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Utrecht University. Bodlaender is known for his work on graph algorithms and parameterized complexity and in particular for algorithms rela ...

, Michael Fellows, Danny Hermelin, Lance Fortnow and Rahul Santhanam for their work on

kernelization In computer science, a kernelization is a technique for designing efficient algorithms that achieve their efficiency by a preprocessing stage in which inputs to the algorithm are replaced by a smaller input, called a "kernel". The result of solvi ...

lower bounds. In October 2016, Downey received a distinguished

Humboldt Research Award The Humboldt Prize, the Humboldt-Forschungspreis in German, also known as the Humboldt Research Award, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of G ...

for his academic contributions. With Denis Hirschfeldt, Downey won another Shoenfield Prize from the Association for Symbolic Logic, this time the 2016 book prize for ''Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity''. In 2018, Downey delivered the

Gödel Lecture The Gödel Lecture is an honor in mathematical logic given by the Association for Symbolic Logic, associated with an annual lecture at the association's general meeting. The award is named after Kurt Gödel and has been given annually since 1990. ...

of the Association for Symbolic Logic, titled ''Algorithmic randomness'', at the European Summer Meeting at Udine, Italy. The same year, Downey was awarded the Rutherford Medal, the highest honour awarded by the Royal Society of New Zealand, "for his pre-eminent revolutionary research into computability, including development of the theory of parameterised complexity and the algorithmic study of randomness." In 2022, Downey was awarded the New Zealand Association of von Humboldt Fellows Research Award for research over the preceding five years.
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References

External links

Home page
at Victoria University of Wellington {{DEFAULTSORT:Downey, Rodney G. Living people Australian computer scientists Australian mathematicians New Zealand computer scientists University of Queensland alumni Monash University alumni Victoria University of Wellington faculty Theoretical computer scientists Mathematical logicians Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the Royal Society of New Zealand 1957 births 20th-century New Zealand mathematicians 21st-century New Zealand mathematicians Recipients of the Rutherford Medal Gödel Lecturers