Martin Edward Dyer (born 16 July 1946 in

Ryde, Isle of Wight Ryde is an English seaside town and civil parish on the north-east coast of the Isle of Wight. The built-up area had a population of 24,096 according to the United Kingdom Census 2021, 2021 Census. Its growth as a seaside resort came after the ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

) is a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

in the School of Computing at the

University of Leeds The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884, it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine (established 1831) and was renamed Y ...

Leeds Leeds is a city in West Yorkshire, England. It is the largest settlement in Yorkshire and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds Metropolitan Borough, which is the second most populous district in the United Kingdom. It is built aro ...

. He graduated from the

in 1967, obtained his MSc from

Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...

in 1968 and his PhD from the

in 1979. His research interests lie in

theoretical computer science Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the Abstraction, abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The Associati ...

discrete optimization Discrete optimization is a branch of optimization in applied mathematics and computer science. As opposed to continuous optimization, some or all of the variables used in a discrete optimization problem are restricted to be discrete variables&mda ...

and

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many ...

. Currently, he focuses on the complexity of counting and the efficiency of Markov chain algorithms for approximate counting.

Key contributions

Four key contributions made by Martin Dyer are: #polynomial time algorithm for approximating the volume of convex bodies (with

Alan Frieze Alan M. Frieze (born 25 October 1945 in London, England, London, England) is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1966, and ...

and

Ravindran Kannan Ravindran Kannan (; born 12 March 1953, Madras) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he leads the algorithms research group. He is also the first adjunct faculty of Computer Science and Automation Department of Indian In ...

) #linear programming in fixed dimensions #the path coupling method for proving mixing of Markov chains (with Russ Bubley) #complexity of counting constraint satisfaction problems

Awards and honours

In 1991, Professor Dyer received the

Fulkerson Prize The Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of $1,500 each are presented at e ...

in Discrete Mathematics (Jointly with Alan Frieze and Ravi Kannan for the paper "A random polynomial time algorithm for approximating the volume of convex bodies" in the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery) awarded by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Programming Society. In 2021 he was awarded the Godel Prize for the paper "An Effective Dichotomy for the Counting Constraint Satisfaction Problem." SIAM J. Computing. 42(3): 1245-1274 (2013) (Jointly with David Richerby) which is sponsored jointly by the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science and ACM SIGACT. (Other contemporaneous recipients were Andrei Bulatov, Jin-Yi Cai,

Xi Chen Xi Chen () is a computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at Columbia University. Chen won the 2021 Gödel Prize and Fulkerson Prize for his co-authored paper "Complexity of Counting CSP with Complex Weights" with Jin-Yi Cai. Bio ...

.) In 2013, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) Awards Committee, consisting of Leslie Ann Goldberg, Vladimiro Sassone and Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide (chair), unanimously decided to give the EATCS Award to Professor Martin Dyer.

Personal

Martin Dyer is married to Alison. They have two adult children.

References

External links

Martin Dyer's webpage

Fulkerson prize-winning paper
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dyer, Martin English computer scientists Living people Academics of the University of Leeds British theoretical computer scientists 1946 births Alumni of Imperial College London