2005-06 Distinguished Speaker Series

Speaker Biography

MICHAEL SIPSER is a theoretical computer scientist, member of CSAIL, and Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California/Berkeley in 1979 under the supervision of Professor Manuel Blum in the EECS Department, and received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Cornell University in 1974.

He has been on the faculty of MIT since 1980, where he was Chairman of Applied Mathematics from 1998 to 2000. He has been Head of the Mathematics Department since July 2004. He was a research staff member at IBM Research in 1980 and spent the 1985-86 academic year on the faculty of the EECS department at Berkeley. Professor Sipser is recognized for his work on complexity theory, automata and language theory, and algorithms. He is the author of the widely used textbook, Introduction to the Theory of Computation. He has been on the editorial board of various journals, including the Journal of the ACM, Information and Computation, and The SIAM Journal of Discrete Mathematics, and has served on numerous program committees of scientific conferences. His published research spans several areas, including efficient error correcting codes, combinatorial algorithms, interactive proof systems, quantum computation, and establishing the inherent computational difficulty of problems.