Nick Pippenger | |
---|---|
Alma mater | B.S., Shimer College Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Spouse(s) | Maria Klawe, 1980 |
Children | Two children |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science |
Institutions | Harvey Mudd College, Princeton University, University of British Columbia |
Nicholas John Pippenger is a researcher in computer science. He has produced a number of fundamental results many of which are being widely used in the field of theoretical computer science, database processing and compiler optimization. He has also achieved the rank of IBM Fellow at Almaden IBM Research Center in San Jose, California. He has taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and at Princeton University in the US. In the Fall of 2006 Pippenger joined the faculty of Harvey Mudd College.
Pippenger holds a B.S. in Natural Sciences from Shimer College and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is married to Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College. In 1997 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. [1] In 2013 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [2]
The complexity class, Nick's Class (NC), of problems quickly solvable on a parallel computer, was named by Stephen Cook after Nick Pippenger for his research on circuits with polylogarithmic depth and polynomial size. [3] [4]
Pippenger became one of the most recent mathematicians to write a technical article in Latin, when he published a brief derivation of a new formula for e , [5] [6] [ non-primary source needed ] whereby the Wallis product for π is modified by taking roots of its terms:
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2022. Its headquarters are in New York City.
Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines to applied disciplines. Though more often considered an academic discipline, computer science is closely related to computer programming.
In computational complexity theory, the class NC (for "Nick's Class") is the set of decision problems decidable in polylogarithmic time on a parallel computer with a polynomial number of processors. In other words, a problem with input size n is in NC if there exist constants c and k such that it can be solved in time O((log n)c) using O(nk) parallel processors. Stephen Cook coined the name "Nick's class" after Nick Pippenger, who had done extensive research on circuits with polylogarithmic depth and polynomial size.
Stephen Arthur Cook is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.
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