Philip N. Klein

For other people named Philip Klein, see Philip Klein (disambiguation).

Philip N. Klein is an American computer scientist and professor at Brown University. His research focuses on algorithms for optimization problems in graphs.  

Philip N. Klein
Nationality	American
Education	Harvard University (BA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Occupations	Computer scientist professor

Klein is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery^[1] and a recipient of the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991).^[2] He is a recipient of Brown University's Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Sciences (2007) and was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2015–16).^[2] He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with an A.B. in Applied Mathematics and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT.^[3]

Key contributions

• In 1991, Klein and his then-students Ajit Agrawal and R. Ravi gave an approximation algorithm for network design that is considered "the first highly sophisticated use of the primal-dual method in the design of approximation algorithms".^[4] In 2023, this research received the Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) 30-year Test of Time Award.^[5][6][7][4]
• In 1994, Klein and Robert E. Tarjan gave a randomized linear-time algorithm to find minimum spanning trees, based on a sampling technique due to David Karger.^[8][9][10]
• In 2005, Klein gave a linear-time algorithm to find a nearly optimal traveling salesman tour in a planar graph.^[11][12]

Books

Klein has published two textbooks:

• Klein, Philip N. (2014). A cryptography primer : secrets and promises. New York, NY, USA. ISBN 978-1-107-01788-7. OCLC 863632974.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)^[13]
• Klein, Philip N. (2013). Coding the matrix : linear algebra through applications to computer science. [Newton, Mass.]: Newtonian Press. ISBN 978-0-615-85673-5. OCLC 855087626.^[14]