Alistair Sinclair

Alistair Sinclair ( born 1960 ) is a British computer scientist. He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sinclair studied at the University of Cambridge with a Bachelor 's degree in 1979 and 1988 with Mark Jerrum at the University of Edinburgh PhD ( Randomized algorithms for counting and generating combinatorial structures) .. He taught in Edinburgh and is a professor at Berkeley.

He was a visiting scientist at DIMACS ( Center for Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science) from Rutgers University and at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.

It deals with the design of randomized algorithms, combinatorial optimization, Monte Carlo methods and numerical applications in statistical physics, in stochastic processes and nonlinear dynamic systems. He examined with Jerrum mixing properties of Markov chains for the construction of approximate algorithms in combinatorial problems such as the calculation of the Permanente in polynomial time.

In 1996 he was awarded with Mark Jerrum the Gödel Prize and Jerrum 2006 and his PhD student Eric Vigoda the Fulkerson Prize ( for her work A polynomial - time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with Nonnegative entries, Journal of the ACM, Vol 51, 2004).