Computational Complexity and Statistical Physics
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Allon Percus is a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and
Visiting Associate Professor at the UCLA Mathematics Department.
From 2003 to 2006, he was Associate Director of the
Institute for Pure and Applied
Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA, a national institute established by
the NSF to spark interactions between mathematicians and scientists from
a broad range of fields. He was responsible for scientific
oversight of many of IPAM's activities, working in close collaboration
with organizing committees across disciplines to create and run programs
spreading the impact of mathematics throughout the sciences.
Dr. Percus received his B.A. in physics from Harvard in 1992 and his Ph.D. from the Université Paris-Sud, Orsay in 1997. His research has combined discrete optimization and statistical physics, exploiting physical models and techniques to study the performance of algorithms on NP-hard problems. Together with Stefan Boettcher, he developed the method of Extremal Optimization that has since been applied to problems ranging from social networks to protein folding. Other research interests include the phase structure of combinatorial problems over ensembles of random instances, using this phase structure to motivate better algorithms and extending the picture to random network models closely reflecting real-world data. Dr. Percus has led several interdisciplinary project teams at Los Alamos, and has organized numerous conferences and workshops exploring the overlap between combinatorics, phase transitions and computational complexity. |
Department of Mathematics
University of California, Los Angeles
Box 951555
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1555
Tel: (310) 825-2627
Fax: (310) 206-2679
E-mail: 
Last modified: 20 Jan 2008
