Madhu Sudan

Research contribution and awards In 1998, he received the Sloan Research Fellowship. He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2002. The prize recognizes outstanding work in the mathematical aspects of computer science. Sudan was honored for his work in advancing the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs—a way to recast a mathematical proof in computer language for additional checks on its validity—and developing error-correcting codes. For the same work, he received the ACM's Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1993 and the Gödel Prize in 2001 and was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1998. He is a Fellow of the ACM (2008). In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2014 he won the Infosys Prize in the mathematical sciences. In 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2021, he was awarded the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for 2022.

Sudan has made important contributions to several areas of theoretical computer science, including probabilistically checkable proofs, non-approximability of optimization problems, list decoding, and error-correcting codes.