Oren Patashnik (born 1954) is an American computer scientist. He is notable for co-creating

BibTeX BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. The BibTeX tool is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The name is a portmanteau ...

, and co-writing '' Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science''. He is a researcher at the Center for Communications Research, La Jolla, and lives nearby in San Diego. Oren and his wife Amy have three children, Josh, Ariel, and Jeremy.

History

Oren Patashnik graduated from

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the w ...

in 1976, and later became a doctoral student in computer science at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

, where his research was supervised by

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...

. While working at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mul ...

in 1980, Patashnik proved that

Qubic 3D tic-tac-toe, also known by the trade name Qubic, is an abstract strategy board game, generally for two players. It is similar in concept to traditional tic-tac-toe but is played in a cubical array of cells, usually 4x4x4. Players take turns pla ...

can always be won by the first player. Using 1500 hours of computer time, Patashnik's proof is a notable example of a

computer-assisted proof A computer-assisted proof is a mathematical proof that has been at least partially generated by computer. Most computer-aided proofs to date have been implementations of large proofs-by-exhaustion of a mathematical theorem. The idea is to use a ...

. In 1985, Patashnik created the bibliography-system,

, in collaboration with

Leslie Lamport Leslie B. Lamport (born February 7, 1941 in Brooklyn) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX an ...

, the creator of

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

. LaTeX is a system and

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

for formatting documents, which is especially designed for mathematical documents. BibTeX is a widely used bibliography-formatting tool for

. In 1988, Patashnik assisted

Ronald Graham Ronald Lewis Graham (October 31, 1935July 6, 2020) was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He ...

and

in writing '' Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science

an important mathematical publication and college textbook. In 1990, he got his doctorate in computer science. His thesis paper was about "Optimal Circuit Segmentation for Pseudo-Exhaustive Testing

After the 2003 Cedar Fire (2003), Cedar Fire destroyed 60% of the houses in his immediate neighborhood, his statistical study
Joseph W. Mitchell and Oren Patashnik, Firebrand Protection as the Key Design Element for Structure Survival during Catastrophic Wildland Fires, Fire and Materials 2007 conference, San Francisco, January, 2007 showed that houses with a Wood shingle#Shakes, wood-shake shingle roof did very badly, but surprisingly, so did houses with a Spanish-style, curved-red-tile roof.

Notes

References

(PDF) "How to Win at Tic-Tac-Toe" (Mathellaneous, July 2005, University of Melbourne)
- 11-page article with a section relating Patashnik's effort on Qubic

1954 births Living people American computer scientists Jewish American scientists Jewish scientists Yale University alumni Timothy Dwight College alumni Stanford University alumni BibTeX {{Compu-bio-stub