Dr. Madhu Sudan
Award Year: 2004 | Degree Year: 1987
Dr. Madhu Sudan received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1987. After graduating from IIT, he went to the University of California, Berkeley for his Ph.D. He submitted his doctoral dissertation in 1992, which got him the ACM doctoral dissertation award for the best Ph.D. thesis of the year. His thesis work attracted widespread attention and was even covered in the New York Times. From 1992 to 1997, Madhu Sudan worked at IBM’sThomas J. Watson Research Centre in New York in the Mathematical Sciences Department. In 1997, Dr. Madhu Sudan joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, and is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the same institute.
Madhu Sudan works in computational complexity and coding theory. He has made fundamental contributions in these two research areas and has established new connections between the two. In coding theory, his work shows how the codes commonly used on CDs and DVDs can correct more errors than previously thought as possible. In computational complexity, his work focuses on the “approximability of optimization problems” and explains why a wide variety of optimization problems are as hard to solve approximately as they are to solve exactly. Incidentally, his interest in theoretical computer science and computational complexity dates back to his IIT Delhi days.
He is a leading researcher in the field of theoretical computer science. His achievements have been recognized in both coding theory and computer science communities. He received the Information Theory Society Paper Prize in 2000 and Godel Prize in 2001 for his contributions to coding theory and computer science respectively. In 2002, he was awarded the highly prestigious Nevanlinna Prize by the International Mathematical Union, for his outstanding work in mathematical aspects of information and computation. He is the Distinguished Alumnus of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also served on numerous program committees for conferences in this area and was the program committee chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity 2001, and the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science 2003. He is on the Editorial Boards of several journals such as Journal of the ACM, SIAM Journal on Computing, and Information and Computation.
In honoring Dr. Madhu Sudan, we recognize the outstanding contributions made by him as a Scientist. Through his achievements, Dr. Madhu Sudan has brought glory to the name of this Institute.
