Bruno Courcelle is a French

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

, best known for

Courcelle's theorem In the study of graph theory, graph algorithms, Courcelle's theorem is the statement that every graph property definable in the monadic second-order logic, monadic second-order logic of graphs can be decided in linear time on graphs of bounded treew ...

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of '' graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conn ...

Life

Courcelle earned his Ph.D. in 1976 from the

French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...

, then called IRIA, under the supervision of

Maurice Nivat Maurice Paul Nivat (21 December 1937 – 21 September 2017) was a French computer scientist. His research in computer science spanned the areas of formal languages, programming language semantics, and discrete geometry. A 2006 citation for an h ...

. He then joined the Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (LaBRI) at the

University of Bordeaux 1 The University of Bordeaux 1 (french: Université Bordeaux-I) was one of the four universities in the Academy of Bordeaux, together with the Bordeaux Segalen University (Bordeaux 2), Michel de Montaigne University (Bordeaux 3) and Montesquieu U ...

, where he remained for the rest of his career. He has been a senior member of the

Institut Universitaire de France The Institut Universitaire de France (IUF, Academic Institute of France), is a service of the French Ministry of Higher Education that distinguishes each year a small number of university professors for their research excellence, as evidenced by t ...

since 2007. A workshop in honor of Courcelle's retirement was held in Bordeaux in 2012.Bruno Courcelle
text of remarks presented by

at Courcelle workshop, retrieved 2014-06-24. Courcelle was the first recipient of the S. Barry Cooper Prize of the Association Computability in Europe in 2020. In 2022, Courcelle was awarded the EATCS-IPEC Nerode Prize. During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...

, Courcelle protested against vaccination mandates in France.

Work

He is known for

, which combines

second-order logic In logic and mathematics, second-order logic is an extension of first-order logic, which itself is an extension of propositional logic. Second-order logic is in turn extended by higher-order logic and type theory. First-order logic quantifies ...

, the theory of

formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of s ...

s, and tree decompositions of graphs to show that a wide class of algorithmic problems in

have efficient solutions.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Courcelle, Bruno Year of birth missing (living people) Living people French mathematicians French computer scientists Graph theorists