Neil Immerman

Neil Immerman (born 24 November 1953 in Manhasset, New York) is an American theoretical computer scientist and a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is one of the key developers of descriptive complexity, an approach he applies to research in model checking, database theory and computational complexity theory, and he is an editor of the SIAM Journal on Computing and of Logical Methods in Computer Science. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Yale University in 1974 and his doctorate from Cornell University in 1980 under the supervision of Juris Hartmanis. His book Descriptive Complexity appeared in 1999. Jointly with Róbert Szelepcsényi he won the 1995 Gödel Prize for the proof of the Immerman-Szelepcsényi theorem, that nondeterministic space complexity classes are closed under complementation. He is an ACM Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.