University of California, San Diego
Mikhail (Misha) Alekhnovich was born on October 26, 1978 in Moscow, USSR and died on August 5, 2006 in a kayaking accident during a Class 6 whitewater expedition in Russia. From 1995 to 2000, he was a student in the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics at Moscow State University, where he was awarded Diploma with Honors. His diploma thesis, Pseudorandom generators in propositional proof complexity, was written under the supervision of Alexander A. Razborov. In 2000, he was a member in the special program on Computational Complexity at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
From 2001 to 2003, he was a graduate student in the Department of Mathematics of the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology. His doctoral thesis, written under the supervision of Madhu Sudan, is entitled Propositional Proof Systems: Efficiency and Automatizability. From 2003 to 2005 he held a postdoc position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where his host was Avi Wigderson. From 2005 onwards, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, University of California at San Diego.
Although only 27 years old at the time of his tragic death, Misha Alekhnovich already had an impressive string of research accomplishments to his credit, including major papers on propositional proof complexity, inapproximability, and computational learning theory.
His premature death has robbed the theory community of one of its brightest young stars.
Institut für Informatik
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University of Toronto
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University of Toronto
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