Jon Kleinberg

Kleinberg's work is noted for its diversity, creativity, scholarship and brilliance. He has contributed in deeply significant ways to our understanding of information networks and the people who use them, recognizing that one cannot fully understand the former without studying the latter. This has included the understanding of hubs and authorities in the hyperlinked structure of the World Wide Web, path discovery in small world networks, and influence spread (contagion) in networks. His masterful book (joint with the economist David Easley) Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World won the Lanchester Prize in 2011 for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English in the previous three years. His work on the bursty behavior of temporal data streams has also been highly influential, and he has contributed important results across a wide variety of additional areas, including algorithmic graph theory, clustering, high-dimensional algorithmic geometry, game theory, approximation algorithms, queuing theory, social choice and computational biology. Kleinberg's work effectively combines both theory and experiment, with far-reaching impacts on everyday activities such as web search, while embodying and foreshadowing a convergence between computing and the social sciences.