Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize for 2007

The winner of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize for 2007 is the paper "Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony'' by Cynthia Dwork, Nancy Lynch, and Larry Stockmeyer, which appeared in the Journal of the ACM, Vol. 35, No. 2, April, 1988. pages 288--323. (A preliminary version appeared in PODC 1984.) This is the second time that Nancy Lynch winds up this prize since she had received it before in 2001 for her classic paper

Michael J. Fischer , Nancy A. Lynch and Michael S. Paterson. "Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process", Journal of the ACM, April 1985, 32(2):374-382.

One can say that, despite how faulty researchers may be in evaluating the quality of scientific work, there is definite consensus on Nancy's huge impact on research in the principles of distributed computing! Congratulations to the winners.

It is sad that Larry Stockmeyer is not here with us to enjoy yet another achievement in his distinguished career. He passed away in 2004. Look here for some commemorations that took place at that time.

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