Martin Farach-Colton

Martin Farach-Colton is an American computer scientist, known for his work in streaming algorithms, suffix tree construction, pattern matching in compressed data, cache-oblivious algorithms, and lowest common ancestor data structures. He is a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, and a co-founder of storage technology startup company Tokutek.

Farach-Colton is of Argentine descent, and grew up in South Carolina. While attending medical school, he met his future husband, with whom he now has twin children. He obtained his M.D. in 1988 from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of Maryland, College Park under the supervision of Amihood Amir. He was program chair of the 14th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2003).

The cache-oblivious B-tree data structures studied by Bender, Demaine, and Farach-Colton beginning in 2000 became the basis for the fractal tree index used by Tokutek's products TokuDB and TokuMX.

Farach-Colton is an avid Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner and received a bronze medal at the 2015 World Master Jiu-Jitsu IBJJF Championship. He received his black belt from Josh Griffiths in 2018.Farach-Colton also serves on several charity boards including the Ali Forney Center and Lambda Legal.

• Amir, Amihood; Benson, Gary; Farach, Martin (April 1996), "Let sleeping files lie: pattern matching in Z-compressed files" (PDF), Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 52 (2): 299–307, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.45.6476, doi:10.1006/jcss.1996.0023, MR 1393996.
• Farach, Martin (1997), "Optimal suffix tree construction with large alphabets", 38th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS '97, Miami Beach, Florida, USA, October 19-22, 1997, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 137–143, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.45.4336, doi:10.1109/SFCS.1997.646102.
• Farach, M.; Thorup, M. (April 1998), "String matching in Lempel-Ziv compressed strings", Algorithmica, 20 (4): 388–404, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.45.5484, doi:10.1007/PL00009202, MR 1600834.
• Bender, Michael A.; Farach-Colton, Martin (2000), "The LCA problem revisited" (PDF),in Gonnet, Gaston H.; Panario, Daniel; Viola, Alfredo (eds.), LATIN 2000: Theoretical Informatics, 4th Latin American Symposium, Punta del Este, Uruguay, April 10-14, 2000, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1776, Springer, pp. 88–94, doi:10.1007/10719839_9.
• Charikar, Moses; Chen, Kevin; Farach-Colton, Martin (2004), "Finding frequent items in data streams" (PDF), Theoretical Computer Science, 312 (1): 3–15, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.145.8413, doi:10.1016/S0304-3975(03)00400-6, MR 2045483. Previously announced in ICALP 2002.
• Bender, Michael A.; Demaine, Erik D.; Farach-Colton, Martin (2005), "Cache-oblivious B-trees", SIAM Journal on Computing, 35 (2): 341–358, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.32.4093, doi:10.1137/S0097539701389956, MR 2191447. Previously announced at FOCS 2000.