Nationality Dutch Doctoral students Ronald Cramer Fields Computer Science | Name Paul Vitanyi Books Algorithmic Statistics | |
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Born 21 July 1944 (age 79)
Budapest ( 1944-07-21 ) Alma mater Free University of Amsterdam Known for Simplicity theory
Kolmogorov complexity
Normalized Compression Distance
Normalized Google Distance
Information Distance
Incompressibility Method Doctoral advisor Jaco de Bakker, Arto Salomaa | ||
Education VU University Amsterdam | ||
Paul Vitanyi
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.
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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.
Vitanyi was appointed Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam, and worked as researcher at the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica where he is a CWI Fellow.
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, and is a member of the Academia Europaea.
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.
Together with Ming Li he pioneered theory and applications of Kolmogorov complexity. They co-authored the textbook An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, 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).