Walter John Savitch (February 21, 1943 – February 1, 2021) was best known for defining the complexity class NL (nondeterministic logarithmic space), and for Savitch's theorem, which defines a relationship between the

NSPACE In computational complexity theory, non-deterministic space or NSPACE is the computational resource describing the memory space for a non-deterministic Turing machine. It is the non-deterministic counterpart of DSPACE. Complexity classes The mea ...

and

DSPACE DSpace is an open source repository software package typically used for creating open access repositories for scholarly and/or published digital content. While DSpace shares some feature overlap with content management systems and document manag ...

complexity classes. His work in establishing

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 has helped to create the background against which non-deterministic and probabilistic reasoning can be performed. He also did extensive work in the field of natural language processing and mathematical linguistics. He was focused on computational complexity as it applies to

genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...

and

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

for over 10 years. Aside from his work in

theoretical computer science 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 ...

, Savitch wrote a number of textbooks for learning to program in C/C++,

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

Ada Ada may refer to: Places Africa * Ada Foah, a town in Ghana * Ada (Ghana parliament constituency) * Ada, Osun, a town in Nigeria Asia * Ada, Urmia, a village in West Azerbaijan Province, Iran * Ada, Karaman, a village in Karaman Province, ...

, Pascal and others. Savitch received his PhD in mathematics from

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 1969 under the supervision of

Stephen Cook Stephen Arthur Cook (born December 14, 1939) is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor at the Unive ...

. Since then he was a professor at

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...

in the computer science department.

References

External links

Richard J. Lipton Richard Jay Lipton (born September 6, 1946) is an American computer scientist who is Associate Dean of Research, Professor, and the Frederick G. Storey Chair in Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has ...

,
Savitch’s Theorem
'. Gives a historical account on how Savitch's Theorem was discovered. American computer scientists University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, San Diego faculty 1943 births 2021 deaths Computational linguistics researchers {{compu-scientist-stub