Michael Sipser

Department Head
Barton L. Weller Professor of Mathematics
Algorithms, Complexity Theory

Michael Sipser is a theoretical computer scientist, member of CSAIL, and the Barton L. Weller Professor of Mathematics at MIT. He received a PhD in Engineering from the University of California/Berkeley 1980 under the supervision of Manuel Blum in the EECS Department, and a BA 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, spent the 1985-86 academic year on the faculty of the EECS department at Berkeley and was a Lady Davis Fellow at Hebrew University in 1988. His research areas are in algorithms and complexity theory, specifically efficient error correcting codes, interactive proof systems, randomness, quantum computation, and establishing the inherent computational difficulty of problems. He is the author of the widely used textbook, Introduction to the Theory of Computation (Cengage, 2005).

His distinctions include the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching Award, 1984, 1989 & 1991, and the MIT School of Science Student Advising Award, 2003. In 2012 he was selected by the Institute to be the Barton L. Weller Professor of Mathematics. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Erdös Number: 3