Biography

Bernard Chazelle (Dipl. Mines-Paris, PhD Yale) has been a professor at Princeton University since 1986, where he holds the Eugene Higgins Chair in Computer Science.

Director of the NSF Center for Computational Intractability, his research focuses on algorithms and complexity. He has been a visiting professor at ENS Ulm, École Polytechnique, Université Paris-Sud and Inria. He has long been a consultant at Xerox PARC, DEC SRC, and NEC Research, where he was Chairman of the Board of Fellows. He is, or has been, a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of ENS Ulm, École Polytechnique and Institut Henri Poincaré. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of ACM, a Guggenheim Fellow, and winner of several prizes from the mathematics association, SIAM.

One of the pioneers of algorithmic geometry, Bernard Chazelle has long worked on the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures in geometry and Combinatorics optimization. One of his major research themes has been the role of randomness in algorithmic complexity, a subject on which he has written a book entitled The Discrepancy Method: Randomness and Complexity. For several years now, he has been pursuing a research program on "natural algorithms", with the aim of building a bridge between algorithms and Dynamics of Living Systems. He is proud to have co-taught the first "integrated science" lecture at Princeton with fellow physicists and biologists.