Philippe Flajolet receives the 2004 CNRS silver medal

Philippe Flajolet, Senior Research Scientist of project ALGO, was just awarded the CNRS silver medal.

• Biography:

Philippe Flajolet, CNRS Silver Medal Winner for 2004

Philippe Flajolet is 56 years old. A former student of the École Polytechnique, he holds a doctoral degree in engineering and a Ph.D. Philippe Flajolet is a renowned scientist in both computer science and mathematics. His work concerns the analysis of algorithms and computer data structures and the combinatorial problems they raise. These questions occur in all areas of computing and its applications, and require advanced mathematical tools.

Today, Philippe Flajolet continues to research the basic phenomena that govern algorithmic complexity, with the conviction that many applications will ensue. Indeed, Philippe Jacquet of project HIPERCOM found inspiration in Flajolet’s work in order to develop communication protocols for mobile networks. Philippe Robert of project RAP uses his work for the analysis of large dataflows in routers. Philippe Flajolet’s insatiable curiosity also translates into a passion for historical linguistics and the comparative philology of Indo-European languages.

Philippe Flajolet joined INRIA in 1971 in the theoretical computing group headed by “Marco” Schützenberger and Maurice Nivat, where he began his research career in computability theory. As early as 1976, he devoted himself to algorithm performance analysis with the arrival of Jean Vuillemin. Together, they founded project ALGO, which Philippe Flajolet headed in 1981 and has never left since.

In 1994, Philippe Flajolet was awarded the Michel Montpetit prize and an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels. He was elected corresponding member of the Academy of Science that same year, then elected member in 2003.

Philippe Flajolet is a worldwide expert invited to the most reputable institutions and is or has been a member of the editorial committees of the most prestigious journals of his field. For instance, Algorithmica, a leading journal in theoretical computer science, dedicated a special issue to Philippe Flajolet in 1998, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. The subject of this special issue was the analysis of algorithm complexity in average.


• In the words of Olivier Faugeras (project ODYSSEE), member of the Academy of Science:

"Philippe Flajolet found original solutions to difficult and profound problems concerning the analysis of the complexity of algorithms in such fields as compilation, information search and sorting, databases, multidimensional search problems, network communication protocols, effective algebra, text analysis, and so on. His work thus practically covers the whole of computer science."

"I will just recall that Flajolet’s work broaches on such diverse fields as symbolic methods in combinatorial enumeration, orthogonal polynomials, special functions, random trees and graphs, complex analysis methods in combinatorial analysis, integral techniques in asymptotic analysis, limit distributions in discrete mathematics, and computational algebra systems."

"Philippe Flajolet is of course one of the greatest worldwide specialists in the analysis of the complexity of algorithms and computer data structures. Such questions are of the highest importance in theoretical computer science and its applications and they often encompass difficult and profound mathematical problems. Just like his elder Donald Knuth, the work of Philippe Flajolet and his numerous collaborators (70 co-authors from 21 countries) and Ph.D. students (16) have profoundly changed the face of computer science and made it possible to better understand it and measure its extreme complexity."