| Leonid Anatolievich Levin | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 2, 1948 Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, Soviet Union |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions | Boston University |
| Alma mater | Moscow University Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral advisor | Andrey Kolmogorov, Albert R. Meyer |
| Known for | research in complexity, randomness, information |
Leonid Anatolievich Levin (Le-oh-NEED LE-vin; Russian: Леони́д Анато́льевич Ле́вин; born November 2, 1948 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) is a Soviet-American computer scientist.
He obtained his master degree in 1970 and a Ph.D. equivalent in 1972 at Moscow University where he studied under Andrey Kolmogorov. Later, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1978 and also earned a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1979. His advisor at MIT was Albert R. Meyer.
He is well known for his work in randomness in computing, algorithmic complexity and intractability, average-case complexity,[1] foundations of mathematics and computer science, algorithmic probability, theory of computation, and information theory.
His life is described in a chapter of the book Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists.[2]
Levin and Stephen Cook independently discovered the existence of NP-complete problems. This NP-completeness theorem, often called the Cook-Levin Theorem, was a basis for one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems declared by the Clay Mathematics Institute with a $1,000,000 prize offered. The Cook–Levin theorem was a breakthrough in computer science and is the foundation of computational complexity. Levin's journal article on this theorem was published in 1973; he had lectured on the ideas in it for some years before that time (see Trakhtenbrot's survey),[3] though complete formal writing of the results took place after Cook's publication.
He is currently a professor of computer science at Boston University, where he began teaching in 1980.