Education
He completed his undergraduate education at Technical University of Denmark and his doctoral studies at Oxford University in 1993.
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Mikkel Thorup
Edit ProfileCareer
From 1993 to 1998, he was at University of Copenhagen and from 1998 to 2013 he was at American Telephone & Telegraph Company Labs-Research in New Jersey. Since 2013 he has been at the University of Copenhagen as a Professor and Head of Center for Efficient Algorithms and Data Structures (the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company). Thorup"s main work is in algorithms and data structures.
One of his best-known results is a linear-time algorithm for the single-source shortest paths problem in undirected graphs (Thorup, 1999).
Thorup is the editor of the area algorithm and data structures for Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He also serves on the editorial boards of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal on Computing, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Algorithms, and the Theory of Computing. He has been a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery since 2005 for his contributions to algorithms and data structures.
He belongs to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters since 2006. In 2010 he was bestowed the American Telephone & Telegraph Company Fellows Honor for “outstanding innovation in algorithms, including advanced hashing and sampling techniques applied to American Telephone & Telegraph Company"s Internet traffic analysis and speech services.” “The papers describe an impressive result in discrete mathematics.
The problem is easily understood and the arguments, despite their depth, are easily accessible to any motivated undergraduate.”.
Achievements
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With Mihai Pătraşcu he has shown that simple tabulation hashing schemes achieve the same or similar performance criteria as hash families that have higher independence in worst case, while permitting speedier implementations. In 2011 he was co-winner of the David P. Robbins Prize from the Mathematical Association of America for solving, to within a constant factor, the classic problem of stacking blocks on a table to achieve the maximum possible overhang, id est (that is), reaching out the furthest horizontal distance from the edge of the table.
