Paul Vitanyi

Paul Vitanyi

Paul Vitanyi 2005
Born 21 July 1944
Budapest
Nationality Dutch
Fields Computer science
Alma mater Free University of Amsterdam
Doctoral advisor Jaco de Bakker
Arto Salomaa
Doctoral students Ronald Cramer[1]
Known for Simplicity theory
Kolmogorov complexity
Normalized Compression Distance
Normalized Google Distance
Information Distance
Incompressibility M ethod

Paul Michael Béla Vitanyi (born 21 July 1944) is a Dutch computer scientist, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.

Biography

Vitanyi was born in Budapest from a Dutch mother and a Hungarian father. He received his degree of mathematical engineer from Delft University of Technology in 1971 and his Ph.D. from the Free University of Amsterdam in 1978.[2]

Vitanyi was appointed Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam, and worked as researcher at the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.

Vitanyi has served on the editorial boards of Distributed Computing (1987–2003), Information Processing Letters; the Theory of Computing Systems; the Parallel Processing Letters; the International journal of Foundations of Computer Science; the Entropy; the Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences (guest editor), and elsewhere.

He received a knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion,[3][4] and is a member of the Academia Europaea.[5]

Work

Vitanyi has worked on cellular automata, computational complexity, distributed and parallel computing, machine learning and prediction, physics of computation, Kolmogorov complexity, information theory and quantum computing, publishing over 200 research papers and some books.[6][7][8]

Together with Ming Li he pioneered theory and applications of Kolmogorov complexity.[9] They co-authored the textbook An Introduction To Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications,[10] parts of which have been translated into Chinese, Russian and Japanese. The Chinese translation received the National Outstanding Scientific and Technological Book Award of the People's Republic of China (1999).

References

  1. ↑ Paul Vitanyi at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ Paul Michael Bela Vitanyi at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  3. ↑ "Paul Vitányi ontvangt koninklijke onderscheiding". Computable (VNU Media). 10 September 2007. Retrieved 29 May 2009.
  4. ↑ Royal Honour for Paul Vitanyi
  5. ↑ Academia Europaea
  6. ↑ Computer science papers DBLP
  7. ↑ Google scholar
  8. ↑ MathSciNet Mathematical Reviews
  9. ↑ M. Li, P. M.B. Vitanyi, Applications of Algorithmic Information Theory. Scholarpedia, 2(5):2658; 2007
  10. ↑ M. Li and P.M.B.Vitanyi, An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications, Springer, New York, 1993 (1st Ed.), 1997 (2nd Ed.), 2008 (3rd Ed.)

External links