Rate My Professor Richard Karp

Karp's research centers on combinatorial algorithms, with pioneering contributions to the theory of computational complexity. His seminal 1972 paper, 'Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems,' demonstrated that twenty-one well-known combinatorial problems are NP-complete, establishing a foundational methodology for identifying computationally intractable problems that has influenced thousands of subsequent studies. Other key works include efficient algorithms for network flow and bipartite matching, the LogP model of parallel computation (1993), a simple algorithm for finding frequent elements in streams (2003, with Shenker and Papadimitriou), and recent publications on multiprotein modularity in evolution (2012). His current interests focus on algorithmic methods in genomics and computer networking. Karp has received the Turing Award (1985) for contributions to algorithm theory and NP-completeness, the U.S. National Medal of Science (1996), Kyoto Prize (2008), Harvey Prize, Fulkerson Prize (1979), Von Neumann Theory Prize (1990), Lanchester Prize, Babbage Prize, and eight honorary degrees. He is a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, the French Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, AAAS, ACM, and INFORMS.