Los Gatos Man Wins 'IT Nobel Prize'

Longtime Los Gatos resident and mathematician Ronald Fagin has received the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2012 W. Wallace McDowell Award.

Fagin is the manager of the Foundations of Computer Science at IBM Research in San Jose's Almaden Valley. He's worked at IBM since 1973.

According to the IEEE, Fagin earned the honor, popularly referred to as the information technology Nobel prize, "for fundamental and lasting contributions to the theory of databases."

"I feel very honored to receive  this award, especially because of the great pioneers in computing who have received it in the past," Fagin said in an email interview since he's attending the International Conference on Database Theory in Berlin, Germany.

Fagin tried to explain databases in layman's terms: "I try to understand fundamental questions about data, including how data should be stored, how it can be accessed efficiently, and how it can be transformed into other data."

Wife Susan Fagin said her husband "absolutely loves math. He likes that it's concrete. One plus one is always two."

The 66-year-old father of three and grandfather of five will receive worldwide recognition for his accomplishment.

"This is very exciting to see him recognized with such a big award. I'm very proud of him," Susan Fagin said. "It's a really big deal."

Fagin has also won the 2011 IEEE Technical Achievement Award for pioneering contributions to the theory of rank and score aggregation, the 2004 ACM Edgar F. Codd Award (a lifetime achievement award in databases), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris in 2001.

His first major contribution to relational database theory was the introduction of "Fourth Normal Form," which captures crucial aspects of database design.

It is now universally accepted and included in all standard database books, from undergraduate textbooks to advanced research monographs. 

Fagin, with Nick Pippenger, Jurg Nievergelt, and Ray Strong, also invented so-called extendible hashing, a database access technique in which the user is guaranteed no more than two page faults to locate the data associated with a given unique identifier, or key.

He has also devised several algorithms, including "Fagin's Algorithm," for combining information from multiple sources.

The work had a significant influence on the design of the query processing component of the IBM InfoSphere Federation Server, and on the design and implementation of the parametric search for IBM WebSphere Commerce.

"I had no intent of getting into computer science, but it turned out that in my Ph.D. thesis, I proved a theorem (now called "Fagin's Theorem") that gives a close connection between mathematical logic (my area of study) and computational complexity theory, so I suddenly found myself doing computer science. Therefore, when it came time to get a job, I decided I wanted to do research at IBM," he said.

Past recipients of the honor include FORTRAN creator John W. Backus (1967); supercomputer pioneers Seymour Cray (1968), Gene Amdahl (1976), and Ken Kennedy (1995); the architect of IBM's mainframe computer Frederick Brooks (1970); Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore (1978); Donald Knuth, the father of algorithm analysis (1980); microprocessor inventor Federico Faggin (1994); World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee (1996); and Lotus Notes creator and Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (2000).

Fagin is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He has also won an IBM Corporate Award, eight IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, and two IBM key patent awards.

He has also published more than 100 papers, and has co-authored "Reasoning about Knowledge." He has served on more than 30 conference program committees, including serving as program committee chair of four different conferences.

He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Dartmouth College, and his doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.