Luca Trevisan (21 July 1971 – 19 June 2024) was an Italian professor who taught computer science at Bocconi University in Milan.

His research focused on computer science theory, including topics such as randomness, cryptography, probabilistically checkable proofs, approximation, property testing, spectral graph theory, and sublinear algorithms. He also maintained a blog called in theory, which discussed computer science theory.

Education and career

Trevisan earned his PhD from La Sapienza in Rome, with the guidance of Pierluigi Crescenzi. After completing postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and DIMACS, he began an assistant professor job at Columbia University. Later, he worked at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2010 joined Stanford University. In 2014, he returned to Berkeley, and in 2019, he moved to the Department of Decision Sciences at Bocconi University.

Recognition

Trevisan received the Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award at the 1997 Symposium on Theory of Computing, the Oberwolfach Prize in 2000, and a Sloan Fellowship in 2000 as well. In 2006, he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid. In 2012, he was an Erdős Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Personal life and death

In 2000, Trevisan revealed his sexual orientation as gay. In 2012, he gathered stories from gay theoretical computer scientists about their experiences in the research community. Trevisan passed away in Milan from cancer on June 19, 2024, at the age of 52.