There are no Nobel Prizes for computer science. There are, in fact, few awards in this discipline that recognize leadership and major accomplishments.
Two professors, however, have won two of the scarce accolades: the Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence and the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize, announced this week by Carnegie Mellon University and the Tokyo University of Technology.
The research excellence prize, for sustained achievement, goes to Christos Papadimitriou, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. He is an expert in algorithms and complexity, and how their theory applies to everything from databases to game theory. (He is also the author of a novel, Turing, and plays in a band called Lady X and the Positive Eigenvalues.) The prize comes with a check for $20,000.
The emerging leadership prize goes to Erik D. Demaine, another professor of electrical engineering and computer science, this time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Demaine is known for his work in computational geometry, which has led him to experiment with algorithms for origami, the art of paper folding. Several of his pieces are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as part of an exhibit titled “Design and the Elastic Mind.” His prize comes with a $10,000 check. —Josh Fischman