Karp, Richard

Richard Karp, in full Richard Manning Karp, (born January 3, 1935, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.), American mathematician and computer scientist and winner of the 1985 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for “his continuing contributions to the theory of algorithms including the development of efficient algorithms for network flow and other combinatorial optimization problems, the identification of polynomial-time computability with the intuitive notion of algorithmic efficiency, and, most notably, contributions to the theory of NP-completeness.” His research interests have included theoretical computer science, combinatorial algorithms, discrete probability, computational biology, and Internet algorithms.

Karp earned a bachelor’s degree (1955), a master’s degree (1956), and a doctorate (1959), all in mathematics, from Harvard University. After finishing his studies, he worked as a mathematician at IBM (1959–68) before moving to academia. Karp held positions at the University of California, Berkeley (1968–94), the University of Washington (1995–99), and again at Berkeley (1999– ), where he returned as a University Professor. In 2012 he founded the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley and served as its director until 2017.

Karp’s 1972 paper “Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems” proved that many commonly studied combinatorial problems are variants of the same problem, which implies they are all probably intractable (NP-complete problems—that is, problems for which no efficient solution algorithm is known). Karp is the author of Complexity of Computation (1974) and holds a patent for a type of multiconnection switching network.

In addition to the Turing Award, Karp received the Fulkerson Prize in Discrete Mathematics (1979), the U.S. National Medal of Science (1996), the Harvard University Centennial Medal (1997), the Israel Institute of Technology Harvey Prize (1998), the Carnegie Mellon University Dickson Prize in Science (2008), and Japan’s Kyoto Prize (2008). He was elected to the New York Academy of Sciences (1980), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1980), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985), the Institute of Combinatorics and Its Applications (1990), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1991), the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (1992), the American Philosophical Society (1994), the French Academy of Sciences (2002), and the European Academy of Sciences (2004).