David Steurer is a German

theoretical computer scientist Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The ACM's Special Inter ...

, working in

approximation algorithms In computer science and operations research, approximation algorithms are efficient algorithms that find approximate solutions to optimization problems (in particular NP-hard problems) with provable guarantees on the distance of the returned sol ...

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 ...

, sum of squares, and

high-dimensional statistics In statistical theory, the field of high-dimensional statistics studies data whose dimension is larger (relative to the number of datapoints) than typically considered in classical multivariate analysis. The area arose owing to the emergence of man ...

. He is an associate professor of computer science at

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

Biography

David Steurer studied for bachelor's and master's degrees at the

University of Saarland Saarland University (, ) is a public research university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in six faculties that cover all major f ...

(2003–2006), and went on to study at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, where he obtained his PhD under the supervision of

Sanjeev Arora Sanjeev Arora (born January 1968) is an Indian-American theoretical computer scientist who works in AI and Machine learning. Life Sanjeev scored the IIT JEE number 1 rank in 1986 He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in ...

in 2010. He then spent two years as a postdoc at

Microsoft Research New England 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 ...

, before joining

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

. In 2017 he moved to

, where he became an associate professor in 2020.

Work

Steurer's work focuses on optimization using the sum of squares technique, giving an invited talk on the topic at the 2018

ICM ICM may refer to: Organizations * Irish Church Missions, an Anglican mission * Institut du Cerveau, the Paris Brain Institute, a research center * Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw * Interna ...

, together with

Prasad Raghavendra Prasad Raghavendra is an Indian-American theoretical computer scientist and mathematician, working in optimization, complexity theory, approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation and statistics. He is a professor of computer science at ...

. Together with Prasad Raghavendra, he developed the

small set expansion hypothesis The small set expansion hypothesis or small set expansion conjecture in computational complexity theory is an unproven computational hardness assumption. Under the small set expansion hypothesis it is assumed to be computationally infeasible to d ...

, for which they won the Michael and Shiela Held Prize. Together with James Lee and Prasad Raghavendra, he showed that in some settings, the sum-of-squares hierarchy is the most general kind of SDP hierarchy. Together with

Irit Dinur Irit Dinur () is an Israeli computer scientist. She is professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 2024 she was appointed a permanent faculty member in the School of Mathematics of the Institute for Advanced Study. Her r ...

, he introduced a new and simple approach to parallel repetition theorems.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Raghavendra, Prasad Indian computer scientists Indian mathematicians Living people University of Washington alumni 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians University of California, Berkeley faculty 1984 births Cornell University faculty Academic staff of ETH Zurich