Christopher Umans is a professor of

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

. He is known for work on

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

computational complexity In computer science, the computational complexity or simply complexity of an algorithm is the amount of resources required to run it. Particular focus is given to computation time (generally measured by the number of needed elementary operations) ...

, algebraic complexity, and

hardness of approximation In computer science, hardness of approximation is a field that studies the algorithmic complexity of finding near-optimal solutions to optimization problems. Scope Hardness of approximation complements the study of approximation algorithms by pro ...

Academic biography

Umans studied at

Williams College Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was kille ...

, where he completed a BA degree in Mathematics and Computer Science in 1996. He then received a PhD in Computer Science from

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 2000 under

Christos Papadimitriou Christos Charilaos Papadimitriou ( el, Χρήστος Χαρίλαος "Χρίστος" Παπαδημητρίου; born August 16, 1949) is a Greek theoretical computer scientist and the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia Un ...

. Following his PhD, he was a postdoctoral researcher at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

until joining Caltech in 2002.

Research

Umans' research centers broadly around algorithms and complexity. He has made notable contributions to varied areas within this space including

random number generation Random number generation is a process by which, often by means of a random number generator (RNG), a sequence of numbers or symbols that cannot be reasonably predicted better than by random chance is generated. This means that the particular outc ...

, expanders, and algorithms for

matrix multiplication In mathematics, particularly in linear algebra, matrix multiplication is a binary operation that produces a matrix from two matrices. For matrix multiplication, the number of columns in the first matrix must be equal to the number of rows in the ...

. A notable example is his work on developing a group theoretic approach for matrix multiplication. In 2008, Umans and his student Dave Buchfuhrer settled a 1979 conjecture on the complexity of unbounded Boolean formula minimization; the result won a best paper award at

ICALP ICALP, the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming is an academic conference organized annually by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and held in different locations around Europe. Like most theoret ...

Awards and honors

Umans received an NSF CAREER award in 2004 and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2005. Additionally, his work has received "Best Paper" awards at the International Conference on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP) and the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity (CCC).

References

External links

Chris Umans professional home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Umans, Chris Living people California Institute of Technology faculty Theoretical computer scientists Year of birth missing (living people)