American mathematician Stephen Cook wins BBVA Foundation award – El Diario de Yucatan

         

     

MADRID (Notimex) .- The American mathematician Stephen Cook was today declared the winner of the BBVA Foundation Award VIII “Frontiers of Knowledge” in information and communications technology, to classify what computers can solve problems and what not.

The jury met in Beijing and chaired by Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, Georg Gottlob, announced that this determination has an impact on many areas of economy, trade and other of the everyday life.

 

Cook (Buffalo, New York, 1939), Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, studied the classification of problems P (which have an easy resolution) and NP (not efficient resolution).

His contribution was establish in 1971 a new class within the NP: the NP-complete, not resolvable, but problems are equivalent in computational terms, so if an algorithm to solve one could solve he were all .

These problems have in areas such as biology, physics, economics, number theory, logic and others, which resulted in being considered one of the seven “Problems Millennium “(” P versus NP “) of the Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States.

Cook jobs have ensured that being not solvable problems, should be an algorithm is believed to would be put at risk encrypted systems, eg computer security banking, online shopping and others who are now based on schemes NP.

On this, the winner said he is not entirely clear how would impact in computer cryptography discovery of an algorithm for NP problems, because these systems are never the same in each case.

He stressed that for some years not working this case since it was unsuccessful in trying to find answers, so that other mathematicians are now trying to find algorithms.

of information and communications technology is the second award is announced in the eighth edition of the awards, after . last week that the failure of the Indian climatologist Climate Change Veerabhadran Ramanathan give you

In the coming weeks will announce Sciences; Biomedicine; Ecology and Conservation Biology; Economy, Finance and Management; Development Cooperation and contemporary music.

The prizes to be awarded in June distinguish authors of advances in scientific, technological and artistic areas that constitute the knowledge map in the late twentieth century this

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