Lance Fortnow

Biography

Fortnow received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathmatics at MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Michael Sipser. After two stints at the University of Chicago (spending four years at the NEC Research Institute in-between), Fortnow started as a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Northwestern University in January of 2008. Fortnow also has a courtesy appointment at the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences department at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and an adjunct professorship at the Toyota Technological Institute–Chicago.

Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its applications. His major results 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 where he spent a productive sabbatical year at CWI and the University of Amsterdam.

Among his many activities, Fortnow is the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transaction on Computation Theory and serves as vice-chair of ACM SIGACT, and served as chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity from 2000-2006. Fortnow originated and co-authors the Computational Complexity weblog in the fall of 2003, the first major theoretical computer science blog.