Michael Saks (mathematician)
Michael Ezra Saks is an American mathematician. He is currently the Department Chair of the Mathematics Department at Rutgers University (2017–) and from 2006 until 2010 was director of the Mathematics Graduate Program at Rutgers University. Saks received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 after completing his dissertation entitled "Duality Properties of Finite Set Systems" under his advisor Daniel J. Kleitman. A list of his publications and collaborations may be found at DBLP. In 2016 he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Research. Saks research in computational complexity theory, combinatorics , and graph theory has contributed to the study of lower bounds in order theory, randomized computation, and space–time tradeoff. In Kahn and Saks (1984) it was shown there exist a tight information-theoretical lower bound for sorting under partially ordered information up to a multiplicative constant. In the first super-linear lower bound for the noisy broadcast problem was proved. In a noisy broadcast model, formula_1 processors formula_2 are assigned a local input bit formula_3. Each processor may perform a "noisy broadcast" to all other processors where the received bits may be independently flipped with a fixed probability. The  problem is for processor formula_4 to determine formula_5 for some function formula_6. Saks et al. showed that an existing protocol by Gallager was indeed optimal by a reduction from a generalized noisy decision tree and produced a formula_7 lower bound on the depth of the tree that learns the input. In Beame et al. (2003) the first time–space lower bound trade-off for randomized computation of decision problems was proved. Positions. Saks holds positions in the following journal editorial boards: