Lance Fortnow is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science at Northwestern University specializing in computational
complexity and its applications to economic theory. He also hold a
courtesy appointment at the the Kellogg
Graduate School of Management and an adjunct professorship at the
Toyota Technological Institute–Chicago.
Fortnow received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathmatics at MIT in 1989 under
the supervision of Michael Sipser. Before he joined Northwestern in 2008,
Fortnow was a professor at the University of Chicago, a senior
research scientist at the NEC Research Insitute and a one-year visitor at CWI
and the University of Amsterdam.
Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its
applications, most recently to micro-economic theory. His work
on interactive proof systems and time-space lower bounds for
satsifability have led to his election as a 2007 ACM Fellow. In
addition he was an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow from 1992-1998 and
a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 1996-97.
Fortnow's survey The
Status of the P versus NP Problem
is CACM's most downloaded article. Fortnow is currently working
on a book expanding on that article.
