Franco P. Preparata

Franco P. Preparata (born December 1935 in Italy) is a computer scientist and An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Brown University. He is best known for his 1985 book Computational Geometry: An Introduction, written with M. I. Shamos, which became the standard textbook in the field for many years and was translated into Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Polish. He also worked in coding theory, contributing the Berlekamp-Preparata codes and the Preparata codes, the first known systematic class of nonlinear binary codes; in 1967 he contributed to the PMC model of system-level fault diagnosis; and he worked in parallel computation and VLSI theory, including the cube-connected-cycles parallel architecture developed with Jean Vuillemin. More recently his research has focused on computational biology, including a novel approach to DNA sequencing by hybridization developed with Eli Upfal. He received a doctorate from the University of Rome in 1959, joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1965, and moved to Brown University in 1991, remaining active until his retirement at the end of 2013. He is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow.