Tuesday, December 18, 2012
The second 2012 Derick Wood Graduate Scholarship has been awarded to Vinayak Pathak. Pathak is a PhD student at the School who is studying for his PhD with Prof. Anna Lubiw. He previously earned his MMath degree under the supervision of Prof. Timothy Chan.
Vinayak has been studying a fundamental problem about the structure of binary search trees, which are a basic way of representing information held in a sorted order. Specifically, he is studying the minimum number of operations called rotations that transform one binary search tree into another. With his advisor Anna Lubiw, he has shown a connection to computational geometry, and proved that two generalizations of the problem in this domain are NP-complete.
The Scholarship honours Professor Derick Wood, who taught at Waterloo from 1982 to 1992, and wrote two textbooks, "Theory of Computation" and "Data Structures, Algorithms, and Performance.
