“The 2020 S. Barry Cooper Prize is awarded to Bruno Courcelle for his work on the definability of graph properties in Monadic Second Order Logic, through a sequence of seminal papers and a book (joint with Joost Engelfriet). This forms an outstanding example of theory building, bringing together logic, computability, graph grammars, and various notions of graph width (tree-width, clique-width and rank-width) and opening new avenues in our understanding of graph structure theory and the computability and complexity of graph algorithms. Besides its foundational character, the work has had great impact on a number of areas of computer science, including in parameterized algorithmics, verification and other areas, and has influenced a generation of researchers in this field. It has straddled the divide between the logical and algorithmic aspects of theoretical computer science.”
The ACiE President
Paola Bonizzoni
Big Congratulations to Bruno Courcelle for the first S. Barry Cooper Prize. I was very fortunate to meet him at Dagstuhl in 2004, resulting a nice paper on Seese’s conjecture and an algorithm to decide rank-width≤k, making two chapters of my Ph.D. thesis.
In the photo, you can find me and Bruno.