Joachim Grollman John Geske Roy Rubinstein Ashish Naik A. Pavan S. Sengupta Liyu Zhang Dung Nguyeen Andrew Hughes Mitsunori Ogihara (postdoctoral advisee) Edith Hemaspaandra (postdoctoral advisee) Christian Glasser (postdoctoral advisee)
He became a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and an assistant professor of mathematics at Florida State University, before moving to the computer science department of Iowa State University, eventually becoming a full professor there. In the late 1980s he moved to Northeastern University, becoming acting dean there, and in 1990 he moved again to the University at Buffalo as chair of computer science. He retired in 2014, and died on January 22, 2021.[4]
Selman's research publications included well-cited works on the classification of different types of reductions according to their computational power, the formulation of promise problems, the complexity class UP of problems solvable by unambiguous Turing machines, and their applications to the computational complexity of cryptography:[2][3]
As well as being the editor of several edited volumes, Selman was the coauthor of the textbook Computability and Complexity Theory (with Steve Homer, Springer, 2001; 2nd ed., 2011).[7]
Recognition
Selman was a Fulbright Scholar and Humboldt Fellow.[4] He was named an ACM Fellow in 1998, as "an influential contributor to computational complexity theory and a dedicated professional within the academic computer science community".[8] In 2002, ACM SIGACT (the Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory of the Association for Computing Machinery) gave him their Distinguished Service Prize, noting his work in helping to found the Computational Complexity Conference and in helping to fund theoretical computer science research through his work drafting policy reports for the National Science Foundation.[9]
The journal Theory of Computing Systems is organizing a commemorative issue celebrating his memory.[6]
References
^Selman, Sharon, In memoriam, University at Buffalo, retrieved 2021-08-06
^ abcHemaspaandra, Lane A. (September 2014), "Beautiful structures: An appreciation of the contributions of Alan Selman", ACM SIGACT News, 45 (3): 54–70, doi:10.1145/2670418.2670436, S2CID1948170
^ abcdDr. Alan L. Selman 1941-2021, Iowa State University Department of Computer Science, February 12, 2021, retrieved 2021-08-06