Gary Miller

Gary Miller received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1975 under the supervision of Manuel Blum.  Following periods on the faculty at the University of Waterloo, the University of Rochester, MIT and the University of Southern California, Miller moved to Carnegie Mellon University, where he is now Professor of Computer Science. In addition to his influential thesis on computational number theory and primality testing, Miller has worked on many central topics in computer science, including graph isomorphism, parallel algorithms, computational geometry and scientific computing. His most recent focus on scientific computing led to breakthrough results with students Ioannis Koutis and Richard Peng in 2010 that currently provide the fastest algorithms—in theory and practice—for solving "symmetric diagonally dominant" linear systems, which have important applications in image processing, network algorithms, engineering and physical simulations. Miller won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award in 2003 for his work on primality testing, and the Knuth Prize in 2013 for algorithmic contributions to theoretical computer science. He was elected an ACM Fellow in 2002.