1. Rodney Graham Downey was born on 20 September 1957 and is a New Zealand and Australian mathematician and computer scientist, an emeritus professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
13 Facts About Rod Downey
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Rod Downey is known for his work in mathematical logic and computational complexity theory, and in particular for founding the field of parameterised complexity together with Michael Fellows.
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Rod Downey was promoted to reader in 1991, was given a personal chair at Victoria in 1995, and retired in 2023.
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Rod Downey was president of the New Zealand Mathematical Society from 2001 to 2003.
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Rod Downey is the author or co-author of around 300 research papers, including a highly cited sequence of four papers with Michael Fellows and Karl Abrahamson setting the foundation for the study of parameterised complexity.
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In 1990, Rod Downey won the Hamilton Research Award from the Royal Society of New Zealand.
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In 1992, Rod Downey won the Research Award of the New Zealand Mathematical Society "for penetrating and prolific investigations that have made him a leading expert in many aspects of recursion theory, effective algebra and complexity".
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Rod Downey has given invited lectures at the International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and the ACM Conference on Computational Complexity.
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Rod Downey was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2007 "for contributions to computability and complexity theory", becoming the second ACM Fellow in New Zealand, and in the same year was elected as a fellow of the New Zealand Mathematical Society.
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In October 2016, Rod Downey received a distinguished Humboldt Research Award for his academic contributions.
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In 2018, Rod Downey delivered the Godel Lecture of the Association for Symbolic Logic, titled Algorithmic randomness, at the European Summer Meeting at Udine, Italy.
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In 2022, Rod Downey was awarded the New Zealand Association of von Humboldt Fellows Research Award for research over the preceding five years.
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In 2023, Downey was awarded the S Barry Cooper Prize from the Association for Computability in Europe.