Quick Facts
Biography
Daniel Alan Spielman (born March 1970 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) has been a professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Yale University since 2006. In October 2012 he was named a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.
Education
Daniel Spielman attended The Philadelphia School, Episcopal Academy, and Germantown Friends School. He received his bachelor of arts degree in mathematics and computer science from Yale University in 1992 and a PhD in applied mathematics from MIT in 1995 (his dissertation was called "Computationally Efficient Error-Correcting Codes and Holographic Proofs"). He taught in the Mathematics Department at MIT from 1996 to 2005.
Awards
In 2008 he was awarded the Gödel Prize for his joint work on smoothed analysis of algorithms.
In 2010 he was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize "for smoothed analysis of Linear Programming, algorithms for graph-based codes and applications of graph theory to Numerical Computing" and the same year he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
In 2012 he was part of the inaugural class of Simons Investigators providing $660,000 for five years for curiosity driven research.
In 2013, together with Adam Marcus and Nikhil Srivastava, he provided a positive solution to the Kadison–Singer problem, a result that was awarded the 2014 Pólya Prize.
He gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010.
In 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.