Professor Leslie Ann Goldberg

Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Computer Science

Leslie Ann Goldberg is a Senior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall and is the Head of the Department of Computer Science at Oxford.

Leslie is interested in foundational questions in Algorithms and Complexity Theory. A primary goal in this area is to figure out which computational problems can be solved with fast algorithms and to discover fast algorithms for solving these problems. The other primary goal is to figure out which problems probably can’t be solved with fast algorithms, and to prove that no fast algorithms exist for solving these problems (usually relying on conjectures from the field of complexity theory).

Leslie is especially interested in randomised algorithms, which are algorithms that use probabilistic methods to solve problems. Randomised algorithms arise in a huge variety of computational applications. Leslie is particularly interested in the rigorous, mathematical analysis of these algorithms – proving results about how long the algorithms take, and how accurate they are.

Leslie grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA. She received her BA from Rice University in 1987 and her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1992. Before coming to Oxford in the summer of 2013, Leslie worked as a Senior Member of Technical Staff in the Algorithms and Discrete Maths Department of Sandia National Laboratories in the USA and then as a Lecturer, Reader, and Professor at the Universities of Warwick and Liverpool.

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Mathematics

Undergraduate course page

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An introduction to research in Computational Complexity Theory

26 Jun 2019

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