Logic List Mailing Archive

2004 Sacks Prize awarded (Mileti & Segerlind)

The 2004 Sacks Prize Awarded jointly to J. Mileti and N. Segerlind
The ASL Committee on Prizes and Awards has selected Joseph Mileti of the
University of Chicago and Nathan Segerlind of the University of Washington
as the recipients of the 2004 Sacks Prize. The prize consists of a cash
award plus five years free membership in the ASL for each awardee.

Mileti received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, under the supervision of Carl Jockusch. His thesis,
Partition theorems and computability theory, was cited by the Prizes and
Awards Committee as containing a "penetrating computability theoretical
analyses of Ramsey-type theorems, an important feature of which is an
ingeneous completely new proof of the Canonical Ramsey Theorem whose ideas
allowed a deep effective analysis of this theorem.''

Segerlind received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of California,
San Diego, under the supervision of Sam Buss and Russell Impagliazzo. The
Committee noted that his thesis, New Separations in Propositional Proof
Complexity, "extends switching lemmas, one of the most primary tools in
the area, in a very unexpected way, that, among other things allowed him
to take, in a single step, one important proof system from an almost
complete mystery to being almost completely understood.''

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The Sacks Prize is awarded for the most outstanding doctoral dissertation
in mathematical logic; it was established to honor Professor Gerald Sacks
of MIT and Harvard for his unique contribution to mathematical logic,
particularly as adviser to a large number of excellent Ph.D. students. The
Prize became an ASL Prize in 1999; the Fund on which the Prize is based is
now administered by the ASL and the selection of the recipient is made by
the ASL Committee on Prizes and Awards. The Sacks Prize consists of a cash
award plus five years free membership in the ASL. This is an international
prize, with no restriction on the nationality of the candidate or the
university where the doctorate is granted.