Dennis Shasha

Dr. Dennis Shasha is a professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of NYU where he works with biologists on pattern discovery for microarrays, combinatorial design, and network inference; and with physicists and financial people on algorithms for time series. Other areas of interest include database tuning, tree and graph matching, and cryptographic file systems. Because he "likes to type," he has written four books of puzzles, a biography about great computer scientists, and technical books about database tuning, biological pattern recognition and time series. He also writes the puzzle columns for Scientific American and Dr. Dobb's Journal. After graduating from Yale, Shasha worked for IBM designing circuits and microcode. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1984. He has written many books, including four involving the mathematical detective Dr. Ecco for W.H. Freeman and W.W. Norton, and a book of biographies about great computer scientists called Out of Their Minds: the lives and discoveries of 15 great computer scientists. In addition, he has co-written fifty journal papers, sixty conference papers, and seven patents.