Biography
Michael Sipser is the Donner Professor of Mathematics and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.
He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1980 and joined the MIT faculty that same year. He was Chairman of Applied Mathematics from 1998 to 2000 and served as Head of the Mathematics Department 2004-2014. He served as interim Dean of Science 2013-2014 and then as Dean of Science 2014-2020.
He was a research staff member at IBM Research in 1980, spent the 1985-86 academic year on the faculty of the EECS department at Berkeley and at MSRI, and was a Lady Davis Fellow at Hebrew University in 1988. His research areas are in algorithms and complexity theory, specifically efficient error correcting codes, interactive proof systems, randomness, quantum computation, and establishing the inherent computational difficulty of problems. He is the author of the widely used textbook, Introduction to the Theory of Computation (Third Edition, Cengage, 2012).
His distinctions include the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching Award, 1984, 1989 & 1991, the MIT School of Science Student Advising Award, 2003, the U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Alumni Award, 2015, and the Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellowship, 2016. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
