Professor of Computer Science; William M. Coughran Jr. Leadership Chair, Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences; Executive Officer for Computing and Mathematical Sciences
B.A., Williams College, 1996; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2000. Assistant Professor, Caltech, 2002-08; Associate Professor, 2008-10; Professor, 2010-; Coughran Leadership Chair, 2022-; Division Deputy Chair, 2018-20; Executive Officer, 2020-.
Research interests: computational complexity, randomness in computation, algebraic complexity and algorithms, hardness of approximation
Overview
Professor Umans is interested in theoretical computer science, and especially computational complexity. He enjoys problems with an algebraic flavor, and this often leads to research questions in derandomization and explicit combinatorial constructions, algebraic algorithms, coding theory, and hardness of approximation.
Research Website