Valiant, Leslie

Leslie Valiant, in full Leslie Gabriel Valiant, (born March 28, 1949, Budapest, Hung.), Hungarian-born American computer scientist and winner of the 2010 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, “for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science.”

Valiant received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1970 and a diploma in computer science from Imperial College, London, in 1973. He was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 1973 to 1974, and he received a doctorate in computer science from the University of Warwick in Coventry, Eng., in 1974. He became a lecturer at the University of Leeds and later at the University of Edinburgh. In 1982 he became a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Harvard University. He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, which is given for work dealing with the mathematical aspects of information science, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley, Calif., in 1986.

Valiant’s most-notable paper, “A Theory of the Learnable” (1984), provided a mathematical foundation for describing how a computer could learn. In this paper Valiant introduced the “probably approximately correct” (PAC) model, in which an algorithm posits a hypothesis based on some data set and applies that hypothesis to future data. The hypothesis will likely have some level of error, and the PAC model gives a framework for determining that level and thus how well the algorithm can learn. The PAC model has been greatly influential in artificial intelligence and in applications such as handwriting recognition and filtering unwanted e-mails.

Valiant made key contributions to the theory of computational complexity. In 1979 he created a new class of complexity, #P, in which a #P problem is determining the number of solutions to an NP problem. He discovered the unexpected result that even though it can be very easy to determine whether certain problems have a solution, it can be extremely hard to determine the number of solutions.

Valiant also wrote several papers about the theory of parallel computing, in which a problem is broken down into several parts that are worked on simultaneously by multiple processors. In “A Bridging Model for Parallel Computation” (1990), he introduced the bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) model, in which individual processors communicate with each other only after finishing their computations. Each cycle of computation, communication, and then synchronization of the processors is called a superstep. Separating computation from communication avoids instances of deadlock, in which activity stops because each processor is waiting for data from another processor.

Valiant has applied methods from computer science and mathematics to understanding the human brain. In his book Circuits of the Mind (1994), he posited a “neuroidal” model that would explain how the brain can learn and perform certain tasks faster than an electronic computer even though the individual neurons are comparatively slow and sparsely connected to each other.