Computer Algebra Pioneer Bruno Buchberger Wins Award

June 3, 2008

Bruno Buchberger, an innovator of automated tools for doing mathematics, has been named by the Association for Computing Machinery as this year's winner of its Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for achievement in computer science.

A professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, Buchberger helped develop the theory of Groebner bases—a crucial building block in computer algebra—and devised an algorithm for finding these bases. His algorithm is now part of software systems such as Mathematica, Macsyma, Magma, Maple, and Reduce. These programs allow computers to manipulate mathematical equations and expressions in symbolic form and are heavily used in science and engineering.

Buchberger was the founder and first editor-in-chief of the Journal for Symbolic Computation and head of the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation at Johannes Kepler University. He has received the Honorary Cross for Science and Culture, First Class, from the Austrian Ministry of Science.

Buchberger is currently working on the Theorema project, which aims to extend existing computer algebra systems by facilitating mathematical proving. In the long term, Buchberger and his colleagues hope to create interactive textbooks for mathematicians that contain algorithms in executable form and automatically generated proofs.

Buchberger will receive the prize at the ACM's annual Awards Banquet, on June 21, in San Francisco.

Source: Association for Computing Machinery, May 13, 2008.