Beyond NP: the work and legacy of Larry Stockmeyer

  • Authors:

  • Lance Fortnow

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the thirty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
  • Year:
  • 2005

  • Efficient probabilistically checkable debates

    APPROX'11/RANDOM'11 Proceedings of the 14th international workshop and 15th international conference on Approximation, randomization, and combinatorial optimization: algorithms and techniques

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Abstract

Shortly after Steve Cook and Richard Karp showed the ex-istence of many natural NP-complete languages, researchers started to realize the great importance of the P versus NP problem and the difficulty of settling it. One graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started to look beyond NP, asking what problems have a higher complexity and how do we classify them. Larry Stockmeyer discovered an amazing structure of complexity classes that continues to direct the research in complexity to this day. Stockmeyer passed away on July 31, 2004 at the age of 55 and in this paper we review some of his research and the legacy he has left on the community.