Daniel Alan Spielman is professor of Applied Mathematics

Applied mathematics

Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...

 and Computer Science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at 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...

 (since 2006).

Daniel Spielman attended The Philadelphia School. He received his B.A. in mathematics and computer science from Yale University in 1992 and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics (dissertation: Computationally Efficient Error-Correcting Codes and Holographic Proofs) from MIT in 1995. He taught in the
Mathematics Department at MIT during 1996-2005.

In 2008 he was awarded the 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...

 for his joint work on smoothed analysis

Smoothed analysis

Smoothed analysis is a way of measuring the complexity of an algorithm. It gives a more realistic analysis of the practical performance of the algorithm, such as its running time, than using worst-case or average-case scenarios....

 of algorithms.

In 2010, he was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize

Nevanlinna Prize

The Rolf Nevanlinna Prize is awarded once every 4 years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, for outstanding contributions in Mathematical Aspects of Information Sciences including:...

 "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

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...

.

He holds several patents in the area of coding theory with the U.S. Patent Office.