Best paper award named for retired ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� professor

Emily Adams — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:41:44 +0000

Best paper award named for retired ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� professor Emily Adams Fri, 05/08/2026 - 14:41

Harold "Hal" Gabow retired from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� in 2008, but his impact on computer science theory is still going strong.

In addition to continuing to publish research papers in his retirement, in 2025 Gabow endowed a new best paper award for the Association of Computer Machinery's Transactions on Algorithms, a journal for which he served as a founding editor.

We caught up with Gabow to learn more about the award, his continued passion for computing theory and what he sees as some of ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��'s most important contributions to the field.

Tell us about how Transactions on Algorithms got started.

The Journal of Algorithms (JoA) was founded in 1980 by Herb Wilf and Don Knuth. It became a prominent venue for publication of research articles in the emerging field of algorithm design. A special feature was David Johnson’s NP-Completeness Column, which covered the latest results on the central problem of theoretical computer science: “Does P equal NP? If one can check the solution to a problem quickly, can one find the solution of the problem quickly?” (a Millennium Prize Problem of the Clay Mathematics Institute, worth $1 million).

In 2003, the JoA editorial board decided to move the journal to a publisher with broader appeal. I worked with the Association for Computing Machinery to get the journal approved as ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG). We continued the mission of disseminating the best papers dealing with the mathematics of discrete algorithms, their design and their analysis. We also continued the NP-Completeness Column, due to its popularity and importance on a question with great implications for algorithm design, computation and mathematics in general.

What is your goal for the Harold N. Gabow Best Paper Award?

Working with the current editor of TALG, we created a new type of award. The theoretical computer science community has two common types of awards for research papers: best paper awards (best paper presented at a given conference or a journal’s best paper of the year) and test-of-time awards (for papers at a conference that was 10 years ago, or 20 or 30).

This award is a combination – it goes to an article published in the last three years in TALG. This time frame means that the article is recent (like a best paper award) but has begun to influence current research in the field (like a test-of-time award). My goal for the award is to maintain TALG’s dominance in publishing the best articles on algorithm design and to help researchers, both young and more established, to gain recognition for their work.

How will the winners be chosen, and what do they receive?

Winners are chosen by a committee centering around the TALG editorial board, following a detailed procedure. The cash award of $1,024 is a tribute to binary numbers, the language of computers and discrete mathematics (1024 = 2^10).

While you're retired from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, you have remained active in the computer science theory community. What have you been up to?

After retiring in 2008, I had the luxury of going back to my first love, matching algorithms. These algorithms find the best ways to pair up compatible entities – current real-life applications include kidney and liver donation (transplant chains and paired donor exchanges); assignment of students to schools (eg, Denver Public School System’s SchoolChoice program) and doctors to hospitals (National Resident Matching Program). In retirement, I published 10 research papers culminating in best-known algorithms for several related types of matching. I probably could have researched these algorithms decades earlier, but the pressures of daily academic life didn’t allow it. I count retirement as an academic benefit!

What are the most exciting things you’re seeing in the theory space right now?

The progress of AI in mathematical research and algorithm design! An example from just last month is Anthropic Claude’s solution to a discrete mathematics problem that was stumping Donald Knuth, one of JoA’s founding editors. It is undoubtedly just a matter of time before an AI agent is listed as a contributing author in a TALG paper. Although the entire field of mathematics will evolve to incorporate AI, there will always be a niche for traditional algorithms, guaranteed by their simplicity and beauty to endure forever.

What do you see as ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� most important contributions to computer science theory?

Gene Meyers, my PhD student with co-advisor Andrzej Ehrenfeucht, designed the widely used BLAST tool for human genome sequencing analysis. Very recently, my algorithm for maximum cardinality matching was adopted by the Library of Efficient Data Types and Algorithms.

In 2025, Professor Emeritus Harold "Hal" Gabow endowed a new best paper award for the Association of Computer Machinery's Transactions on Algorithms, a journal for which he served as a founding editor.

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Best paper award named for retired ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ professor