FCS News

Faculty of Computer Science alumnnus, Peter O'Hearn was awarded the 2016 Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science - and the most important prize in theoretical computer science.

This award is given jointly by European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computational Theory (ACM SIGACT). The award is named in honor of Kurt Gödel. Gödel's connection to theoretical computer science is that he was the first to mention the "P versus NP" question, in a 1956 letter to John von Neumann in which Gödel asked whether a certain NP-complete problem could be solved in quadratic or linear time.

Peter’s paper Resources, Concurrency and Logical Reasoning introduces and advances the idea of Concurrent Separation Logic (CSL), which has had a far-reaching impact in both theoretical and practical realms. 

Learn more about Peter O'Hearn's winning via UCL Engineering News.

Peter O'Hearn graduated from Dalhousie University with his BSc in Computing Science in 1985. He now lives in London, England, and works at Facebook building and deploying static analysis tools - notably using infer, a static analyzer acquired when Facebook took over O'Hearn's startup, Monoidics.

Read Peter's profile in the Fall 2014 CS Magazine.