Christos H. Papadimitriou Professor of Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley Fellow of AAAS, ACM, NAE, NAS
	Christos H. Papadimitriou is the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and the Senior Scientist of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Before joining Berkeley in 1996 he taught at Harvard, MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, and UCSD. He has written five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, AI, the Internet, economics, and evolution. He has also published three novels. He is a member of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S., the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. He holds a PhD from Princeton, and seven honorary doctorates.   Computing the Universe Abstract: Computer science has gone far beyond its traditional role of solving real world problems by computer. Over the last 80 years, computer scientists have developed a novel, algorithmic way of understanding the capabilities and limitations of computers that has proven valuable to contemplating important and deep problems in the sciences. This talk will review how recent computational insights have changed the way we think about the quantum nature of the universe, the puzzle of phase transitions, the prediction of rational behavior in economics, and even the Darwinian evolution of a species.