This year marks 50 years of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, often regarded as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” Since 1966, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has recognized on an annual basis individuals who have contributed lasting and major technical accomplishments to computing. Richard Karp, affiliated with ICSI since its founding in 1988 and former lead of the Algorithms Group, received the Turing Award in 1985. His contributions to the theory of computational algorithms which earned him the award are “now standard methodology for proving problems to be computationally difficult.” Over the years, his work has focused on algorithmic answers to biological problems, heuristic algorithms, and problems related to machine learning.