Nick Pippenger

Nicholas John Pippenger is a researcher in theoretical computer science whose results on parallel computation, database processing and compiler optimization are widely used in the field. He reached the rank of IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, taught at the University of British Columbia and at Princeton University, and joined the faculty of Harvey Mudd College in the fall of 2006. He holds a bachelor's degree in natural sciences from Shimer College and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1997 and a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013. The complexity class NC, known as Nick's Class and made up of problems that can be solved quickly on a parallel computer, was named by Stephen Cook in honour of Pippenger's research on circuits of polylogarithmic depth and polynomial size. He also published a short derivation of a new product formula for the number e in Latin.