Ronald Fagin

Ronald Fagin (born 1945, in Oklahoma City) is an American mathematician and computer scientist who is an IBM Fellow at IBM Research in Silicon Valley. He is known for Fagin's theorem, a foundational result in descriptive complexity theory showing that existential second-order logic captures the complexity class NP, and for influential work on database normal forms, including fourth and fifth normal form and domain-key normal form, as well as on reasoning about knowledge. He earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 under Robert Vaught and joined IBM Research that year. He received the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2004, the IEEE W. Wallace McDowell Award in 2012, and the Godel Prize in 2014.