Faculty & Staff
Two Columbia Engineering Professors Named Simons Society Senior Fellows
Christos Papadimitriou and Michael Weinstein are being recognized for their considerable achievements in their respective fields and their dedication to teaching
Columbia Engineering Professors Christos Papadimitriou and Michael Weinstein have been elected senior fellows of the Simons Society of Fellows. This prestigious honor is given in recognition of their considerable achievements in the fields of computer science and applied mathematics and their years of service as educators and mentors to younger generations of researchers. Founded in 2014, the Simons Society of Fellows is a community of scholars that encourages dialogue and collaboration among researchers across a wide range of disciplines.
Christos Papadimitriou is the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science. His research often explores areas beyond computer science through what he calls “the algorithmic lens”--biology and the theory of evolution, economics and game theory (where he helped found the field of algorithmic game theory), artificial intelligence and robotics, networks and the Internet and, since 2013, the study of the brain and language.
Papadimitriou, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, taught at UC Berkeley for 22 years before coming to Columbia in 2017, and before that taught at Harvard, MIT, the National Technical University of Athens, Stanford, and UC San Diego. He authored the textbooks Computational Complexity, Combinatorial Optimization, Algorithms, and Elements of the Theory of Computation. He has also written novels, including the New York Times best-seller Logicomix and his latest, Independence.
Michael Weinstein is a professor of applied mathematics in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia Engineering and a professor of mathematics at Columbia University. Weinstein works on the mathematical modeling, analysis, and applications of wave phenomena across many areas of physical science. A recent focus has been on PDE (Partial Differential Equations) models which describe optical and quantum waves in novel media such as topological insulators and metamaterials. Such physical media have applications to technologies which could potentially revolutionize robust information transfer in computing and communication systems.
Weinstein is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). In 2015, he received a Math + X Investigator Award from the Simons Foundation.