Nancy Ann Lynch was born on January 19, 1948. She is a computer scientist who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, she holds the title of NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. She leads the "Theory of Distributed Systems" research group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Education and early life
Lynch was born in Brooklyn. She studied mathematics. She went to Brooklyn College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1972, she earned her Ph.D. from MIT with the guidance of Albert R. Meyer.
Work
She taught math and computer science at several universities, including Tufts University, the University of Southern California, Florida International University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), before joining the MIT faculty in 1982. Since then, she has focused on using mathematics to study and build complex systems that operate across many computers. She has guided the work of more than 25 doctoral students, 50 master’s students, and several postdoctoral researchers.
Her research from 1985 with Michael J. Fischer and Mike Paterson on agreement problems in systems received the PODC Influential-Paper Award in 2001. Their work showed that in a system where computers operate independently without a set schedule, agreement among them is impossible if one computer fails. Jennifer Welch noted that this discovery had a major influence on distributed computing, helping designers clarify how systems function under certain conditions.
She has written many research articles about distributed algorithms, impossibility results, and methods to model and test distributed systems (for example, input/output automaton). She also authored the graduate textbook Distributed Algorithms. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and an ACM Fellow.
Recognition
- 1997: ACM Fellow
- 2001: Dijkstra Paper Prize of PODC conference
- 2001: Elected to the National Academy of Engineering for developing basic ideas for how computers work together.
- 2006: Van Wijngaarden Award
- 2007: Knuth Prize
- 2007: Dijkstra Paper Prize of PODC conference
- 2010: IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award
- 2012: Athena Lecturer
- 2015: Elected to the National Academy of Sciences