Combinatorics, Complexity, and Randomness, 1985

Richard M. Karp, of the University of California-Berkeley, received the 1985 ACM A. M. Taring Award for his fundamental contributions to complexity theory. Presented at the Association's Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado, in October, the award is ACM's highest honor in computer science research. By 1972, Karp had established a reputation as one of the world's leading computer science theorists particularly with his seminal paper' "Reducibility among Combinatorial Problems" {in Complexity of Computer Computations [Symposium Proceedings}, Plenum, New York, 1972}. Extending earlier work of Stephen Cook, he applied the concept of polynomial-time reducibility to show that most classical problems of combinatorial optimization are NP-complete and hence intractable unless P equals NP. This changed the way computer scientists looked at practical problems like routing [including the celebrated traveling salesman problem], packing, covering, matching, partitioning, and scheduling, and led to greater emphasis on approximate methods for solving these difficult problems. In later work, Karp pioneered the use of probabilistic analysis to validate the performance of such approximate methods. Karp is a professor in three Berkeley departments: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Mathematics, and Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. This year he is cochair of the year-long research