Richard M. Karp

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Richard M. Karp
Richard M.
Karp
Year
2004
Subject
Computer and Cognitive Science
Award
Benjamin Franklin Medal
Affiliation
University of California, Berkeley | Berkeley, California
Citation
For his contributions to the understanding of computational complexity. His work helps programmers find workable solution procedures, avoiding approaches that would fail to find a solution in a reasonable amount of time. Scientific, commercial or industrial situations where his work applies include establishing least-cost schedules for industrial production, transportation routing, circuit layout, communication network design, and predicting the spatial structure of a protein from its amino acid sequencing.

Richard Karp is a world leader in algorithm design and analysis and computational complexity. His work has helped programmers find workable solution procedures to complex problems, avoiding inordinately time-consuming approaches.

Dr. Karp received his A.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1959. His early career involved work at IBM Watson Research Center, New York University, University of Michigan, and Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. In 1968, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a professor, and became a research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California.

His numerous awards include the Turing Award, Association of Computing Machinery; Lanchester Prize, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences; and the Fulkerson Prize, American Mathematical Society. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering to name a few.

Information as of April 2004