Leslie Valiant
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University

Leslie G. Valiant is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge, at Imperial College, London, and at Warwick University where he received his PhD in 1973. Before coming to Harvard in 1982 he taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, Leeds University and at the University of Edinburgh. In 1986 he received the Nevanlinna Prize at the International Congress of Mathematicians, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991. He is the recipient of the ACM/IEEE Knuth Award for 1997.

His early work was in complexity theory. He introduced the class #P and showed how it could be used to classify counting problems according to their difficulty. His long standing interest in parallel computing produced an efficient routing methodology for implementing communication, and led in 1989 to his suggestion of the bulk synchronous (BSP) model as a paradigm for parallel computers and programs. In 1983 he had introduced the PAC model of learning, which was instrumental in the creation of the field of computational learning theory, and more recently he has proposed this as a foundation for a broader computational study of intelligence. His book Circuits of the Mind (1994) formulates such a study in a framework suggested by cortical neurons.

Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697-3425

November 14, 1997