Richard J. Lipton
Richard J. Lipton Georgia Institute of Technology and Telcordia
What is so important about any algorithm that the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts (CMI) has named it one of the seven millennium problems and offered a $1 million dollar prize for the person who discovers it? Why is P=NP? encoded in binary ASCII in the brickwork above the Princeton computer science building? In 2004, the editor of Computing in Science and Engineering Journal stated that the person who finds this algorithm will “…become an instant megastar,… will certainly appear on the front page of the New York Times and should expect invitations from late-night talk shows and to be the subject of a PBS Nova special.” Actually, the discovery of this algorithm will change the world, as humans know it, so I call it the holy-grail algorithm. This talk is about what the question is, what it means, and what happens if there is a holy-grail algorithm and what if there is none.
Richard J. Lipton is currently an Associate Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and a Chief Consulting Scientist at Telcordia. He holds the Storey Chair of Computer Science at Tech. Prior to that he was a Professor at Princeton University in their Computer Science Department that he helped create in the 1980’s. He also has held tenured positions at the University of California at Berkeley and at Yale University. He received his Ph.D in 1973 from Carnegie-Mellon University. He is an ACM Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He has published over 150 articles on various aspects of computer science. He main research interests are in computational complexity, computer security, and novel methods of computing. He was one of the founders of the field of “DNA Computing”. More about Richard J. Lipton at Georgia Institute of Technology website.