Philippe Flajolet

Philippe Flajolet (1 December 1948 to 22 March 2011) was a French computer scientist whose research was devoted mainly to general methods for analyzing the computational complexity of algorithms, including the theory of average-case complexity. A former student of the École Polytechnique, he received his PhD in computer science from University Paris Diderot in 1973 and a state doctorate from Paris-Sud 11 University in 1979. He introduced the theory of analytic combinatorics and, with Robert Sedgewick of Princeton University, wrote the first book-length treatment of it, Analytic Combinatorics (2009). In 1993 he helped start the workshop series that grew into the AofA international meeting on the analysis of algorithms. At his death he was a research director at INRIA in Rocquencourt; he had been a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1994 and a full member from 2003, and was also a member of Academia Europaea. The HyperLogLog commands of Redis carry the prefix PF in his honor, and the Flajolet Lecture Prize is named for him.