Leonid Levin
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Categories: 1948 births | American computer scientists | American mathematicians | Boston University faculty | Information theorists | Living people | Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni | Moscow State University alumni | People from Dnipropetrovsk | Russian computer scientists | Russian mathematicians | Russian Jews | Soviet computer scientists | Soviet mathematicians
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Leonid Anatolievich Levin (Hebrew: לאוניד אנטולייביץ לוין; Russian: Леонид Анатольевич Левин; born November 2, 1948 in Dnipropetrovsk Ukrainian SSR) is a computer scientist. He studied under Andrey Kolmogorov. He obtained his master degree in 1970 and first Ph.D. in 1972 at Moscow University. Later, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1978 and earned another Ph.D at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. He is well known for his work in randomness in computing, algorithmic complexity and intractability, foundations of mathematics and computer science, algorithmic probability, theory of computation, and information theory. His life is described in a chapter of the book Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists.[1] Levin independently discovered a theorem that was also discovered and proven by Stephen Cook. This NP-completeness theorem, often called by inventors' names (see Cook-Levin Theorem) was a basis for one of the seven "Millennium Math. Problems" declared by Clay Mathematics Institute with a $1,000,000 prize offered. It was a breakthrough in computer science and is the foundation of computational complexity. Levin's journal article on this theorem was published in 1973; he had lectured on the ideas in it for some years before that time (see Trakhtenbrot's survey)[2], though complete formal writing of the results took place after Cook's publication. He is currently a professor of computer science at Boston University, where he began teaching in 1980. Notes
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