Michael Sipser
Michael Fredric Sipser (born September 17, 1954) is an American theoretical computer scientist and a professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He served as the dean of MIT’s School of Science from 2014 to 2020.
Sipser grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and moved to Oswego, New York, when he was 12. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and his father was a mathematics professor at SUNY Oneonta. He earned a BA in mathematics from Cornell University in 1974 and a PhD in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980 under Manuel Blum.
He began at MIT in 1979 as a research associate, worked briefly at IBM Research in San Jose, and joined the MIT faculty in 1980. He spent the 1985–1986 academic year at UC Berkeley before returning to MIT. Sipser led the MIT Mathematics Department from 2004 to 2014 and later served as Interim Dean in 2013 and then Dean of the School of Science from 2014 to 2020.
Sipser is a fellow of several prestigious organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Mathematical Society (for contributions to complexity theory and service to the field), and the Association for Computing Machinery.
His research focuses on algorithms and complexity theory, including error-correcting codes, interactive proof systems, randomness, quantum computation, and understanding the fundamental limits of computation. He helped develop the probabilistic restriction method for proving lower bounds on circuit size, a result that inspired stronger bounds later on. He is known for the Sipser–Gács–Lautemann theorem, which shows that certain problems in randomized computation sit inside the polynomial hierarchy. He connected expander graphs to derandomization and, with his PhD student Daniel Spielman, helped create expander codes. With David Lichtenstein, he showed that the game Go is PSPACE-hard. In quantum computing, he co-invented the adiabatic algorithm with Farhi, Goldstone, and Gutmann. He has long been interested in the P versus NP problem and even bet an ounce of gold on a proof by the end of the 20th century; he sent the coin in 2000 when the problem remained unsolved. Sipser is the author of Introduction to the Theory of Computation, a widely used textbook in theory.
He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ina, and their two children, Rachel and Aaron.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 04:38 (CET).