Madhu Sudan

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Madhu Sudan bigraphy, stories - Indian computer scientist

Madhu Sudan : biography

September 12, 1966 –

Madhu Sudan (born September 12, 1966) is an Indian-American computer scientist. He was professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory until 2009.

Research Contribution and Awards

He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002. The prize recognizes outstanding work in the mathematical aspects of computer science. Sudan was honored for his work in advancing the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs—a way to recast a mathematical proof in computer language for additional checks on its validity—and developing error-correcting codes. For the same work, he received the ACM’s Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1993 and the Gödel Prize in 2001. He is a Fellow of the ACM (2008).

Sudan has made important contributions to several areas of theoretical computer science, including probabilistically checkable proofs, non-approximability of optimization problems, and error-correcting codes.

Career

He received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from IIT Delhi in 1987 and his doctoral degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York from 1992 to 1997 and moved to MIT after that. Since June 2009, he’s been at Microsoft Research New England as a permanent researcher.