Daniel Alan Spielman (born March 1970 in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

Brief bio
/ref>) has been a professor of

applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathemati ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

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 ...

since 2006. As of 2018, he is the Sterling Professor of Computer Science at Yale. He is also the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, since its founding, and chair of the newly established Department of Statistics and Data Science.

Education

Daniel Spielman attended The Philadelphia School, and

Germantown Friends School Germantown Friends School (GFS) is a coeducational independent PreK–12 school in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States under the supervision of Germantown Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Fr ...

. He received his bachelor of arts degree in mathematics and computer science from Yale University in 1992 and a PhD in applied mathematics from

MIT 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 m ...

in 1995 (his dissertation was called "Computationally Efficient Error-Correcting Codes and Holographic Proofs"). He taught in the Mathematics Department at MIT from 1996 to 2005.

Awards

Spielman and his collaborator Shang-Hua Teng have jointly won 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 ...

twice: in 2008 for their work on

smoothed analysis In theoretical computer science, smoothed analysis is a way of measuring the complexity of an algorithm. Since its introduction in 2001, smoothed analysis has been used as a basis for considerable research, for problems ranging from mathematical ...

of algorithms and in 2015 for their work on nearly-linear-time Laplacian solvers. In 2010 he was awarded the

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 ...

"for smoothed analysis of Linear Programming, algorithms for graph-based codes and applications of

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of ''graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conn ...

to Numerical Computing" and the same year he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2012 he was part of the inaugural class of Simons Investigators providing $660,000 for five years for curiosity driven research. In October 2012, he was named a recipient of the

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

. In 2013, together with Adam Marcus and

Nikhil Srivastava Nikhil Srivastava is an associate professor of Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley. In July 2014, he was named a recipient of the Pólya Prize with Adam Marcus and Daniel Spielman. Early life and education Nikhil Srivastava was bo ...

, he provided a positive solution to the

Kadison–Singer problem In mathematics, the Kadison–Singer problem, posed in 1959, was a problem in functional analysis about whether certain extensions of certain linear functionals on certain C*-algebras were unique. The uniqueness was proved in 2013. The statement a ...

, a result that was awarded the 2014 Pólya Prize. He gave a

plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians This is a list of International Congresses of Mathematicians Plenary and Invited Speakers. Being invited to talk at an International Congress of Mathematicians has been called "the equivalent, in this community, of an induction to a hall of fame." ...

in 2010. In 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2022 he won the

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an annual award of the Breakthrough Prize series announced in 2013. It is funded by Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg and others. The annual award comes with a cash gift of $3 million. The Breakthrough Prize ...

"for breakthrough contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics, including to spectral graph theory, the Kadison-Singer problem, numerical linear algebra, optimization, and coding theory.".

References

External links

Yale faculty homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Spielman, Daniel 1970 births Living people Mathematicians from Philadelphia American computer scientists Researchers in geometric algorithms MacArthur Fellows Gödel Prize laureates Nevanlinna Prize laureates Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Scientists from Pennsylvania Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Yale University faculty Yale Sterling Professors Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Yale University alumni Jewish American scientists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Simons Investigator Germantown Friends School alumni 21st-century American Jews Theoretical computer scientists