Ryan Williams

Associate Professor
MIT CSAIL and EECS
32 Vassar St, Cambridge, MA 02140

Email: r...@gmail.com
(Click on the dots to get my email.)

Previously I was a professor at Stanford for five years. I got a PhD from Carnegie Mellon under the marvelous Manuel Blum, and I was an undergrad at Cornell.
For more, see my CV below.
 Teaching in Spring 2017: 6.045

### Research Interests

I work in algorithm design and complexity theory, and especially connections between the two subjects. I think about many questions, but a few of them haunt me more than others. Can the existence of an algorithm for a problem be used to prove that other algorithms cannot exist? Can the nonexistence of algorithms be used to prove that another algorithm correctly solves a problem? (In fact, there are "yes" answers to both questions.) Does every function implementable with a low memory footprint also have a fast implementation? (Is $P = PSPACE$?) Could computers themselves help us make progress on answering these questions?

Huacheng Yu
Cody Murray
Brynmor Chapman
Josh Alman
Dylan McKay