Daniel Spielman is named the Henry Ford II Professor

Daniel A. Spielman, the newly designated Henry Ford II Professor of Computer Science, focuses his research on the design and analysis of algorithms, graph theory, machine learning, error-correcting codes and combinatorial scientific computing.

He has been granted four patents on error-correcting codes that he presented in scholarly papers, as well as a fifth patent for his invention — while still in high school — of a device that employs arrays of light together with a computer to determine which side of a line a ball bounces onin tennis.

A 1992 summa cum laude graduate of Yale, where he earned exceptional distinction in computer science and the Beckwith Prize in mathematics, Spielman received his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught there and at the University of California-Berkeley before joining the Yale faculty in 2005 as professor of applied mathematics and computer science.

Spielman has been recognized with numerous awards and honors for his scholarly contributions, including the 2010 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union, the 2009 Fulkerson Prize, the 2008 Gödel Prize, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He has served as associate editor of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics and on the editorial board of Theory of Computing.