Katayanagi Prizes

SCS Honors Winners April 10

Carnegie Mellon, in cooperation with the Tokyo University of Technology (TUT), will award the second annual Katayanagi Prizes in Computer Science to two outstanding members of the world's computer science community: Christos Papadimitriou and Erik D. Demaine.

The prizes have been endowed with a gift from Japanese entrepreneur and education advocate Koh Katayanagi, who founded TUT and several other technical institutions in Japan over the last 60 years.

The winners will each deliver lectures at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh on April 10. The honorees will lecture at TUT in Tokyo on May 23.

Papadimitriou, who is receiving this year's Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence, is an internationally recognized expert on the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications to databases, optimization, artificial intelligence, networks and game theory. The author of five books, including "Computational Complexity" and "Turing," he is the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley.

Demaine, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Professor and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, will receive the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize. He is a rising star in the area of theoretical computer science with interests in computational geometry, data structures, algorithms and combinatorics.

A MacArthur Fellow, Demaine is especially well known for his work in computational origami, the mathematics of paper folding. The elegant shapes he fashions with folded paper in pursuit of his theories are considered to be works of art. Several pieces are currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as part of an exhibit titled "Design and the Elastic Mind."

Photographed: Koh Katayanagi

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