Cristian S. Calude
Cristian Sorin Calude (born 21 April 1952) is a Romanian-New Zealander mathematician and computer scientist. Biography. After graduating from the Vasile Alecsandri National College in Galați, he studied at the University of Bucharest, where he was student of Grigore C. Moisil and Solomon Marcus. Calude received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest under the direction of Solomon Marcus in 1977. He is currently chair professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and also the founding director of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. Visiting Professor in many universities in  Europe, North and South America, Australasia, South Africa, including Monbusho Visiting Professor, JAIST, 1999 and Visiting Professor ENS, Paris, 2009, École Polytechnique, Paris, 2011; Visiting Fellow, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, 2012; Guest Professor, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, 2017–2020; Visiting Fellow ETH Zurich, 2019. Former professor at the University of Bucharest. Calude is author or co-author of more than 270 research articles and 8 books, and is cited by more than 550 authors. He is known for research in algorithmic information theory, quantum computing, discrete mathematics and history and philosophy of computation. In 2017, together with  Sanjay Jain, Bakhadyr Khoussainov, Wei Li, and Frank Stephan, he announced an algorithm for deciding parity games in quasipolynomial time. Their result was presented by Bakhadyr Khoussainov at the Symposium on Theory of Computing 2017 and won a Best Paper Award. Calude was awarded the National Order of Faithful Service in the degree of Knight by the President of Romania, Mr. Klaus Iohannis, in June 2019. In 2021, together with Sanjay Jain, Bakhadyr Khoussainov, Wei Li, and Frank Stephan, he won the EATCS Nerode Prize for their quasipolynomial time algorithm for deciding parity games.