Thursday, May 27, 2010

First Presburger Award to Mikolaj Bojanczyk

The Presburger Award Committee, consisting of S. Leonardi, A. Tarlecki, and W. Thomas (chair) has chosen Mikolaj Bojanczyk as the first recipient of the EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists.

The motivation from the award committee reads as follows:
Mikolaj Bojanczyk, 32 years old, has contributed numerous deep results to automata theory and to logic and algebra in computer science. Among them is the theorem stating that tree walking automata are strictly weaker than general tree automata, the definition of new decidable logics based on quantifiers for boundedness, and the development of a novel algebraic framework for the study of properties of unranked trees. His work thus led to the solution of long-standing open problems and introduced methods that open new directions in theoretical computer science (also relevant to neighbour disciplines such as data base theory). The committee recommends Mikolaj Bojanczyk as an exceptional young scientist who not only fully deserves the Presburger Award but is also an ideal first recipient. The committee also would like to mention that more than one excellent nomination was made, a fact which lets us hope that the Presburger Award will receive several nominations of truly exceptional level from all areas of theoretical computer science in the coming years.
Let me add that, in 2005, Mikolaj's doctoral thesis, entitled ”Decidable Properties of Tree Languages”, received the Ackermann award of the European Association of Computer Science Logic. In 2006, he was awarded the ”Witold Lipski prize for young Polish researchers in computer science”. In 2007, he received the Kuratowski award for young Polish mathematicians, awarded by the Polish Mathematical Society. In 2009, Mikolaj became one of the very few young computer scientists to obtain a European Research Council Starting Grant.

Congrats to Mikolaj for yet another well-deserved award. May his work go from strength to strength.

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