Michael Mitzenmacher

Michael Mitzenmacher is an American computer scientist who works on algorithms. He is Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and served as its area dean of computer science from July 2010 to June 2013. He also runs the blog My Biased Coin about theoretical computer science. His research covers the design and analysis of randomised algorithms and processes, and with Eli Upfal he wrote a 2005 textbook on randomized algorithms and probabilistic techniques. His doctoral thesis analysed simple randomised load balancing schemes. He is an expert in applications of hash functions such as Bloom filters, cuckoo hashing and locality-sensitive hashing, and his work on min-wise independence gives a fast way to estimate similarity of electronic documents used in internet search engines. He has also worked on erasure codes and error-correcting codes. He earned a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, joined Harvard in 1999, became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014 and was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2019.