Piotr Indyk is a Polish-American scientist who studies computer theory. He is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Theory of Computation Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Academic biography

Indyk was born in Białystok, Poland, and grew up in Gdynia. He earned a Master's degree from the University of Warsaw in 1995 and a PhD from Stanford University in 2000, with guidance from Rajeev Motwani. In 2000, Indyk began working at MIT, where he is now the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Research

Indyk's research mainly focuses on computational geometry in high dimensions, streaming algorithms, and computational learning theory. He has contributed to many areas, including the study of low-distortion embeddings, algorithmic coding theory, and geometric and combinatorial pattern matching. He has also contributed to the theory of compressed sensing. His work on algorithms that calculate the Fourier transform of signals with sparse spectra more quickly than the Fast Fourier Transform method was named one of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies by MIT Technology Review in 2012.

Awards and honors

In 2000, Indyk received the Best Student Paper Award at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS). In 2002, he was given the Career Award by the National Science Foundation. In 2003, he received a Packard Fellowship from the Packard Foundation and a Sloan Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2012, he shared the Paris Kanellakis Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for his work on locality-sensitive hashing. That same year, his research on the sparse Fourier transform was named one of the top 10 "breakthrough technologies" by MIT Technology Review. In 2013, he was named a Simons Investigator by the Simons Foundation. In 2015, he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to high-dimensional geometric computing, streaming and sketching algorithms, and the Sparse Fourier Transform. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2024, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2026, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.