Bio

An influential voice in the discipline of computer science, Lance Fortnow is professor and chair of the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on computational complexity and its applications to economic theory. Fortnow received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 under the supervision of Michael Sipser. Before he joined Georgia Tech in 2012, Fortnow was a professor at Northwestern University, at the University of Chicago, a senior research scientist at the NEC Research Institute and a one-year visitor at CWI and the University of Amsterdam. Since 2007, Fortnow has held an adjoint professorship at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its applications, most recently microeconomic theory. His work on interactive proof systems and time-space lower bounds for satisfiability led to his election in 2007 a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). In addition, he was a National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellow from 1992-1998 and a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 1996-97. Among his many activities, Fortnow served as the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transaction on Computation Theory, served as chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SICACT) and as chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity from 2000-2006. He currently sits on the Computing Research Association board of directors.

Fortnow originated and co-authors the Computational Complexity weblog since 2002, the first major theoretical computer science blog. His popular science book "The Golden Ticket: P, NP and the Search for the Impossible," loosely based on his widely downloaded article from Communications of the ACM.