Robert Sedgewick (computer scientist)
Robert Sedgewick is the William O. Baker Professor in Computer Science at Princeton University and a former member of the board of directors of Adobe Systems. Sedgewick completed his Ph.D. in 1975 under the supervision of Donald Knuth at Stanford. His thesis was about the quicksort algorithm. In 1975–85, he served on the faculty of Brown University.
Sedgewick was the founding chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University and is still a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton. He was a visiting researcher at Xerox PARC, Institute for Defense Analyses and INRIA.
In 1978, along with Leo J Guibas, Sedgewick devised the Red–black tree data structure, by adapting the work of Rudolf Bayer. In 1997, Sedgewick was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his seminal work in the mathematical analysis of algorithms and pioneering research in algorithm animation.
Sedgewick is the author of a book series entitled Algorithms, published by Addison-Wesley. The first edition of the book was published in 1983 and contained code in Pascal. Subsequent editions used C, C++, Modula-3, and Java. Together with Philippe Flajolet, he wrote several books and preprints which promoted analytic combinatorics, a discipline which relies on the use of generating functions and complex analysis in order to enumerate combinatorial structures, and to study their asymptotic properties. In The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth describes this as the key to performing average case analysis of algorithms.
