Biography
Leslie Gabriel Valiant FRS [ 4 ] [ 5 ] (born 28 March 1949) is a British American [ 6 ] computer scientist and computational theorist . [ 7 ] [ 8 ] He was born to a chemical engineer father and a translator mother. [ 9 ] He is currently the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University . [ 10 ] [ 11 ] [ 12 ] [ 13 ] Valiant was awarded the Turing Award in 2010, having been described by the A.C.M. as a heroic figure in theoretical computer science and a role model for his courage and creativity in addressing some of the deepest unsolved problems in science; in particular for his "striking combination of depth and breadth". [ 6 ] Valiant was educated at King's College, Cambridge , [ 14 ] [ 6 ] Imperial College London , [ 14 ] [ 6 ] and the University of Warwick where he received a PhD in computer science in 1974. [ 15 ] [ 1 ] Valiant is world-renowned for his work in Theoretical Computer Science . Among his many contributions to Complexity Theory , he introduced the notion of #P-completeness ("Sharp-P completeness") to explain why enumeration and reliability problems are intractable. He created the Probably Approximately Correct or PAC model of learning that introduced the field of Computational Learning Theory and became a theoretical basis for the development of Machine Learning . He also introduced the concept of Holographic Algorithms inspired by the Quantum Computation model. In computer systems, he is most well-known for introducing the Bulk Synchronous Parallel processing model. Analogous to the von Neumann model for a single computer architecture, BSP has been an influential model for parallel and distributed computing architectures. Recent examples are Google adopting it for computation at large scale via MapReduce , MillWheel, [ 16 ] Pregel [ 17 ] and Dataflow , and Facebook creating a graph analytics system capable of processing over 1 trillion edges. [ 18 ] [ 19 ] There have also been active open-source pr Fields: Mathematics, Theoretical computer science, Computational learning theory, Theoretical neuroscience Education: King's College, Cambridge BA Imperial College London MS University of Warwick PhD Award Citation: Turing Award (2010) EATCS Award (2008) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2001) Knuth Prize (1997) AAAI Fellow (1992) Nevanlinna Prize (1986)
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
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Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)