Richard M. Karp

Leader Emeritus, Algorithms Group
karp @ icsi.berkeley.edu

Richard Karp received his doctorate from Harvard in 1959, after which he worked as a researcher at IBM in Yorktown Heights, New York. In 1968, he was appointed a professor in UC Berkeley’s Computer Science and Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Departments, appointments he continues to hold. He has been involved with ICSI since its founding in 1986, serving on its first Board of Trustees. He was also the first the first member of the Theory Group, later renamed the Algorithms Group, which he led for many years. He went on to found the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley in 2012. He is best known for his work in computational complexity theory, in which he showed that some algorithms problems can be impossibly difficult to solve. He has received the ACM Turing Award, the U.S. National Medal of Sciences, and the Kyoto Prize, which is described as the Japanese Nobel. He is a member of the French and U.S. National Academies of Sciences. In addition to his other appointments, he is also a professor of mathematics and bioengineering. His research interests include theoretical computer science and its outreach to other scientific fields.

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