Daniel Sleator

Daniel Dominic Kaplan Sleator is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who won the 1999 ACM Paris Kanellakis Award jointly with Robert Tarjan for the splay tree data structure. He was one of the pioneers of amortized analysis of algorithms, with early examples including the move-to-front heuristic and splay trees, and he invented several data structures with Tarjan, including splay trees, link/cut trees and skew heaps; the Sleator-Tarjan paper on the move-to-front heuristic first suggested comparing an online algorithm to an optimal offline algorithm, an idea later named competitive analysis. He also developed the theory of link grammars and the Serioso music analyzer for analyzing meter and harmony in written music.