Martin Farach-Colton


Martin Farach-Colton is an American computer scientist, known for his work in streaming algorithms, suffix tree construction, pattern matching in compressed data, cache-oblivious algorithms, and lowest common ancestor data structures. He is a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, and a co-founder of storage technology startup company Tokutek.
Farach-Colton is of Argentine descent, and grew up in South Carolina. While attending medical school, he met his future husband, with whom he now has twin children. He obtained his M.D. in 1988 from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of Maryland, College Park under the supervision of Amihood Amir. He was program chair of the 14th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms.
The cache-oblivious B-tree data structures studied by Bender, Demaine, and Farach-Colton beginning in 2000 became the basis for the fractal tree index used by Tokutek's products TokuDB and TokuMX.
Farach-Colton is an avid Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner and received a bronze medal at the 2015 World Master Jiu-Jitsu IBJJF Championship. He received his black belt from Josh Griffiths in 2018.
Farach-Colton also serves on several charity boards including the Ali Forney Center and Lambda Legal.

Selected publications