Michael Henry Albert (born September 20, 1962) is a mathematician and computer scientist, originally from Canada, and currently a professor in the computer science department at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. His varied research interests include combinatorics and combinatorial game theory.
He received his B.Math in 1981 from the University of Waterloo. In that year Albert received the Rhodes Scholarship, and he completed his D. Phil. in 1984 at the University of Oxford. [1] He then returned to the University of Waterloo. From 1987 to 1996 he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Albert has been at the University of Otago since 1998.
Together with J.P. Grossman and Richard Nowakowski, Albert invented the game Clobber. [2] Albert has also contributed to the Combinatorial Game Suite game analysis software, and is a coauthor of Lessons in Play: An Introduction to Combinatorial Game Theory. [3] Another significant topic of his research has been permutation patterns.
Albert is a keen bridge player, and has won tournaments internationally.
The John von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is awarded annually to an individual who has made fundamental and sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences.
Combinatorial game theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that typically studies sequential games with perfect information. Study has been largely confined to two-player games that have a position that the players take turns changing in defined ways or moves to achieve a defined winning condition. Combinatorial game theory has not traditionally studied games of chance or those that use imperfect or incomplete information, favoring games that offer perfect information in which the state of the game and the set of available moves is always known by both players. However, as mathematical techniques advance, the types of game that can be mathematically analyzed expands, thus the boundaries of the field are ever changing. Scholars will generally define what they mean by a "game" at the beginning of a paper, and these definitions often vary as they are specific to the game being analyzed and are not meant to represent the entire scope of the field.
Richard Manning Karp is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985, The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science in 2004, and the Kyoto Prize in 2008.
Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp was widely known for his work in computer science, coding theory and combinatorial game theory.
Domineering is a mathematical game that can be played on any collection of squares on a sheet of graph paper. For example, it can be played on a 6×6 square, a rectangle, an entirely irregular polyomino, or a combination of any number of such components. Two players have a collection of dominoes which they place on the grid in turn, covering up squares. One player places tiles vertically, while the other places them horizontally. As in most games in combinatorial game theory, the first player who cannot move loses.
Christos Harilaos Papadimitriou is a Greek theoretical computer scientist and the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University.
Jack R. Edmonds is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of computing. He was the recipient of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize.
Clobber is an abstract strategy game invented in 2001 by combinatorial game theorists Michael H. Albert, J.P. Grossman and Richard Nowakowski. It has subsequently been studied by Elwyn Berlekamp and Erik Demaine among others. Since 2005, it has been one of the events in the Computer Olympiad.
Václav (Vašek) Chvátal is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and a Visiting Professor at Charles University in Prague. He has published extensively on topics in graph theory, combinatorics, and combinatorial optimization.
Jacobus Hendricus ("Jack") van Lint was a Dutch mathematician, professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, of which he was rector magnificus from 1991 till 1996.
In mathematics, tiny and miny are operators that yield infinitesimal values when applied to numbers in combinatorial game theory. Given a positive number G, tiny G is equal to {0|{0|-G}} for any game G, whereas miny G is tiny G's negative, or {{G|0}|0}.
Uppaluri Siva Ramachandra Murty, or U. S. R. Murty, is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo.
Paul Michael Béla Vitányi is a Dutch computer scientist, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.
Bernhard H. Korte is a German mathematician and computer scientist, a professor at the University of Bonn, and an expert in combinatorial optimization.
Jim Geelen is a professor at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Waterloo, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Combinatorial optimization. He is known for his work on Matroid theory and the extension of the Graph Minors Project to representable matroids. In 2003, he won the Fulkerson Prize with his co-authors A. M. H. Gerards, and A. Kapoor for their research on Rota's excluded minors conjecture. In 2006, he won the Coxeter–James Prize presented by the Canadian Mathematical Society.
Charles Joseph Colbourn is a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician, whose research concerns graph algorithms, combinatorial designs, and their applications. From 1996 to 2001 he was the Dorothean Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont; since then he has been a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University.
Noam Nisan is an Israeli computer scientist, a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his research in computational complexity theory and algorithmic game theory.
Ralph Gordon Stanton was a Canadian mathematician, teacher, scholar, and pioneer in mathematics and computing education. As a researcher, he made important contributions in the area of discrete mathematics; and as an educator and administrator, was also instrumental in founding the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and for establishing its unofficial mascot of the pink tie.
David Wolfe is a mathematician and amateur Go player.
Ingo Althöfer is a German mathematician at the University of Jena, where he holds the chair of operations research.