Prof. Bernard Chazelle) Princeton University), who was designated as the Distinguished Pollak Lecturer, visited the Computer Science faculty April 2013 and gave a fascinating lecture series on "The Amazing Dynamics of Influence Systems" and "Why Natural Algorithms are the Language of the Living World".

Prof. Chazelle is one of the most well known computer science theoreticians. He has published over 120 papers in top journals in many areas. His early work mostly focused on computational geometry, and he is responsible for development and analysis of optimal algorithms for some of the most fundamental problems in the area such as triangulation, range searching, geometric arrangements, spanning trees, fractional cascading and more. In the last decade he was a central player in the field of sub-linear algorithms, where he developed new data sampling techniques for dealing with massive datasets. More recently he has pioneered an area called natural algorithms, connecting our understanding of biological systems through the algorithmic lens. [Back to the news index]