Constantinos (“Costis”) Daskalakis, a professor at MIT and principal investigator at its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has won the 2018 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.
The ACM awards the prize annually to a computer scientist based on a single recent major technical or service contribution made at or before age 35. According to MIT CSAIL, Daskalakis was honored for “proving that the computational complexity of finding Nash equilibria is the same as that of finding Brouwer fixed points, a proof since extended to several other equilibrium notions.”
The ACM’s citation, as reported by MIT CSAIL, states: “By challenging equilibrium theory, his work has triggered an ongoing reshaping of our understanding of strategic behavior, showing that computation must play an essential role in the foundations of game theory and economics.”
The Nash equilibrium — the state in which every player does the best they can given the choices of all other players, leaving no player with an incentive to unilaterally change course — is a central concept in economic and game-theoretic analysis. Nash’s original existence proof relies on Brouwer’s fixed-point theorem, for which no efficient algorithm is known. Alongside Goldberg and Papadimitriou, Daskalakis proved that the computational complexity of finding Nash equilibria falls in the same class as finding Brouwer fixed points. According to MIT CSAIL, this result has been extended to several other equilibrium concepts, and establishes that Nash equilibrium is computationally intractable in general.
Daskalakis’s research sits at the intersection of computer science, economics, and game theory, with a focus on how strategic behavior complicates large-scale technological systems.
A native of Greece, Daskalakis received his undergraduate degree from the National Technical University of Athens and his PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley. Prior honors listed by MIT CSAIL include the 2018 Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union, the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the 2010 Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, the Simons Investigator Award, and the Kalai Game Theory and Computer Science Prize from the Game Theory Society.