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Nimrod Megiddo

Nimrod Megiddo is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist known for his work on optimization algorithms and computational geometry.

born 1947Prune and search techniqueParametric searchSolving the smallest-circle problem

Occupation: mathematician, computer scientist
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Nimrod Megiddo was born in 1947

Nimrod Megiddo was born in 1947. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics and a master's degree in mathematics. He completed his PhD in mathematics there in 1972, supervised by Michael Maschler.

In the late 1970s he was a professor in the statistics department of Tel Aviv University. He was also on the faculty of Northwestern University. Later he became a research scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center and at Stanford University.

His research covers combinatorial optimization, algorithm design and analysis, game theory and machine learning. In 1983 he proposed the prune and search and parametric search techniques, which solve the smallest-circle problem in linear time. He holds several patents, and his former doctoral students include Edith Cohen.

In 1992 he shared the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for research on the linear complementarity problem and received the INFORMS Computing Society Prize. He became an INFORMS Fellow in 2009 and received the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 2014.