Biography

He attended Boston Latin School and Harvard University, receiving the Ph.D. in 1959. From 1959 to 1968 he was a member of the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM Research. From 1968 to 1994 and from 1999 to the present he has been a professor at UC Berkeley, where he held the Class of 1939 Chair. From 1988 to 1995 and 1999 to the present he has been a Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.

His current activities center on algorithmic methods in genomics and computer networking. He has supervised thirty-six Ph.D. dissertations. Honors and awards include: U.S. National Medal of Science, Turing Award, Fulkerson Prize, Harvey Prize (Technion), Centennial Medal (Harvard), Lanchester Prize, Von Neumann Theory Prize, Von Neumann Lectureship, Distinguished Teaching Award (Berkeley), Faculty Research Lecturer (Berkeley), Miller Research Professor (Berkeley), Babbage Prize and eight honorary degrees. He is a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, the American Philosophical Society and the French Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science.

Education

  • 1959, Ph.D., Applied Mathematics, Harvard
  • 1956, S.M., Applied Mathematics, Harvard
  • 1955, A.B., Mathematics, Harvard

Selected Publications

Awards, Memberships and Fellowships