Mike Paterson

Michael Stewart "Mike" Paterson, is a British computer scientist, who was the director of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Warwick until 2007, and chair of the Department of Computer Science in 2005.

He received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1967, under the supervision of David Park.^[1] He spent three years at MIT and moved to University of Warwick in 1971.^[2]

Paterson is an expert on theoretical computer science with more than 100 publications, especially the design and analysis of algorithms and computational complexity. Paterson's distinguished career was recognised with the EATCS Award in 2006 and a workshop in honour of his 66th birthday in 2008, including contributions of several Turing Award and Gödel Prize laureates. For his work on distributed computing with Fischer and Lynch, he received the Dijkstra Prize in 2001, and his work with Dyer and Goldberg on counting graph homomorphisms received a best paper award at the ICALP conference in 2006. Mike Paterson received a Lester R. Ford Award in 2010.^[3] He is a Fellow of the Royal Society since 2001 and been president of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). According to EATCS president Maurice Nivat, Paterson played a great role in the late 1960s in the recognition of computer science as a science, “and that theoretical computer science, which is very close to mathematics but distinct in its motivation and inspiration, is indeed a challenging and fruitful field of research.” ^[4]

He is also an enthusiastic mountaineer.

See also

• Paterson's worms
• Sprouts

References & recent publications

• M. Dyer, L.A. Goldberg and M. Paterson, On counting homomorphisms to directed acyclic graphs, Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, Report TR05-121, Oct 2005.
• L.A. Goldberg, M. Jalsenius, R. Martin and M. Paterson, Improved mixing bounds for the anti-ferromagnetic Potts Model on Z², LMS J. Comput. Math. 9 (2006) 1-20.
• L.A. Goldberg, R. Martin and M. Paterson, Strong spatial mixing for lattice graphs with fewer colours, SICOMP, 35(2) 486-517 (2005).
• M. Albert and M. Paterson, Bounds for the growth rate of meander numbers, Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics, 2004, University of British Columbia (Vancouver B.C., Canada).
• L.A. Goldberg, M. Jerrum, S. Kannan and M. Paterson, A bound on the capacity of backoff and acknowledgement-based protocols, SICOMP, 88 (2004) 313-331.
• M. Adler, P. Berenbrink, T. Friedetzky, L.A. Goldberg, P. Goldberg and M. Paterson, A proportionate fair scheduling rule with good worst-case performance, Proc. of the 15th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2003), 101-108 (2003).
• L.A. Goldberg, M. Jerrum and M. Paterson, The computational complexity of two-state spin systems, Random Structures and Algorithms, 23(2) 133-154 (2003).
• K. Iwama, A. Matsuura and M. Paterson, A family of NFAs which need 2ⁿ-alpha deterministic states, Theoretical Computer Science 301(1-3), 451-462 (2003).
• L.A. Goldberg, S. Kelk and M. Paterson, The complexity of choosing an H-colouring (nearly) uniformly at random, SICOMP, 33(2) 416-432 (2004) copyright SIAM.
• M. Paterson, H. Schroeder, O. Sykora and I. Vrto, On permutation communications in all-optical rings, Parallel Processing Letters 12(1), 23-29 (2002).

External links

• Mike Paterson's home page
• Workshop in Honour of Prof. Mike Paterson's 66th Birthday
• Mike Paterson at DBLP Bibliography Server