Professor Konstantinos Daskalakis to receive prestigious Grace Murray Hopper Award

Greece’s Professor Konstantinos Daskalakis referred to as a genius and one of the smartest people in the world, who within a year solved Nash’s “riddle”, the equation mathematicians all around the world had been trying to solve for 60 years, has been awarded the prestigious 2018 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

Professor Daskalakis will receive his accolade at a ceremony in San Francisco on June 15th, 2019, along with Michael J. Freedman, professor of Princeton University’s Computer Science Department.

ACM announced that the winners were selected by their colleagues on the basis of their contribution to research in information and computer technologies. The prize is sponsored by Microsoft and is awarded to new computer scientists who have made recent significant contributions.

Daskalakis is Professor at MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and collaborates with the Institute’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems, Operation Research Center and the Institute for Foundations of Data Science.

He is being honored for his significant contributions to Calculation Theory and Economics, in particular to the Computational Complexity of Nash Equilibria.

According to ACM’s reasoning behind the award, strategic interaction greatly complicates behavior in socio-economic environments, such as physical markets and offline social networks as well as online advertising platforms, crypto-currencies, re-distribution of economy platforms, and online social networks. To analyze behaviors in such environments, economists have based their research on the concept of balance.

Daskalakis, along with professors Christos H. Papadimitriou of UC Berkeley and Paul Goldberg of Oxford University, have shown that it is impossible to calculate the Nash balance.

His further research has influenced the ongoing formulation of the study of strategic behavior, particularly with regard to various applications in the economy, and Daskalakis has been honored, among others, with the Nevanlinna Prize and the Simons Foundation Investigator Award, both in 2018.

*Source: AMNA