Neil Immerman is an American theoretical computer scientist

Theoretical computer science

Theoretical computer science is a division or subset of general computer science and mathematics which focuses on more abstract or mathematical aspects of computing....

, a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

University of Massachusetts Amherst

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a public research and land-grant university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States and the flagship of the University of Massachusetts system...

. He is one of the key developers of descriptive complexity

Descriptive complexity

Descriptive complexity is a branch of computational complexity theory and of finite model theory that characterizes complexity classes by the type of logic needed to express the languages in them. For example, PH, the union of all complexity classes in the polynomial hierarchy, is precisely the...

, an approach he is currently applying to research in model checking, database theory, and computational complexity theory.

Professor Immerman is an editor of the SIAM Journal on Computing

SIAM Journal on Computing

The SIAM Journal on Computing is a scientific journal focusing on the mathematical and formal aspects of computer science. It is published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics . As of September 2008, Éva Tardos serves as editor-in-chief.-External links:** on DBLP...

and of Logical Methods in Computer Science

Logical Methods in Computer Science

Logical Methods in Computer Science is a peer-reviewed journal in theoretical computer science and applied logic conceived in 2004...

. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 in 1974 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 in 1980 under the supervision of Juris Hartmanis

Juris Hartmanis

Juris Hartmanis is a prominent computer scientist and computational theorist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory".Hartmanis was born in Latvia...

, another Turing award

Turing Award

The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...

 winner at Cornell. His book "Descriptive Complexity" appeared in 1999.

Immerman is the winner, jointly with Róbert Szelepcsényi

Róbert Szelepcsényi

Róbert Szelepcsényi was a Slovak student of Hungarian descent and a member of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University in Bratislava....

, of the 1995 Gödel Prize

Gödel Prize

The Gödel Prize is a prize for outstanding papers in theoretical computer science, named after Kurt Gödel and awarded jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory .The...

 in theoretical computer science for proof of what is known as Immerman–Szelepcsényi theorem, the result that nondeterministic space

NSPACE

In computational complexity theory, the complexity class NSPACE is the set of decision problems that can be solved by a non-deterministic Turing machine using space O, and unlimited time. It is the non-deterministic counterpart of DSPACE.Several important complexity classes can be defined in terms...

 complexity class

Complexity class

In computational complexity theory, a complexity class is a set of problems of related resource-based complexity. A typical complexity class has a definition of the form:...

es are closed

Closure (mathematics)

In mathematics, a set is said to be closed under some operation if performance of that operation on members of the set always produces a unique member of the same set. For example, the real numbers are closed under subtraction, but the natural numbers are not: 3 and 8 are both natural numbers, but...

 under complementation

Complement (set theory)

In set theory, a complement of a set A refers to things not in , A. The relative complement of A with respect to a set B, is the set of elements in B but not in A...

. Immerman is an ACM

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.

External links

• Immerman's home page at U. Mass. Amherst