Mike Paterson | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1942 (age 81–82) |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Ph.D., University of Cambridge (1967) |
| Known for | Algorithms, complexity |
| Awards | Dijkstra Prize (2001) EATCS Award (2006) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Warwick |
| Thesis | Equivalence Problems in a Model of Computation (1967) |
| Doctoral advisor | David Park |
| Doctoral students | Leslie Valiant |
Michael Stewart Paterson, is a British computer scientist, who was the director of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) at the University of Warwick until 2007, and chair of the department of computer science in 2005.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from the University of Cambridge in 1967, under the supervision of David Park.[1] He spent three years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and moved to the University of Warwick in 1971, where he remains Professor Emeritus.[2]
Paterson is an expert on theoretical computer science with more than 100 publications, especially in the design and analysis of algorithms and computational complexity. Paterson's distinguished career was recognised with the EATCS Award in 2006, and a workshop in honour of his 66th birthday in 2008, including contributions of several Turing Award and Gödel Prize laureates. A further workshop was held in 2017 in honour of his 75th birthday, co-located with the workshop for the 10th anniversary of the DIMAP centre. For his work on distributed computing with Fischer and Lynch, he received the Dijkstra Prize in 2001, and his work with Dyer and Goldberg on counting graph homomorphisms received the best paper award at the ICALP conference in 2006. Mike Paterson received a Lester R. Ford Award in 2010.[3] He is a Fellow of the Royal Society since 2001 and been president of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). According to EATCS president Maurice Nivat, Paterson played a great role in the late 1960s in the recognition of computer science as a science, "and that theoretical computer science, which is very close to mathematics but distinct in its motivation and inspiration, is indeed a challenging and fruitful field of research."[4]
Paterson is also an enthusiastic mountaineer.