Dr. Chris Papadimitriou was born in 1949 in Athens. After receiving his B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Athens Polytechnic, he travelled to the US, where he has been teaching computer science at Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and the MIT since 1976. Moreover, he’s the C. Lester Hogan Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley, Chairman of the Computer Science Department and also holds honorary doctorates from ETH Zurich University since 1997.

Papadimitriou is internationally recognized as a leading expert in computer science and he has been awarded prizes for research excellence. He has published hundreds of research essays and most of his authored books, like Elements of the Theory of Computation, Combinational Optimization and Computational Complexity, have been translated into various languages. Turing is the title of his first novel.

Christos lives permanently in Berkeley, California, but his wife and his daughter Isabelle live in Greece. His life’s all about digits. However, he’s also writing a graphic novel and, as a real piano lover, he plays the keyboards in the Lady X & the Positive Eigenvalues rock band.

In an Internet post referring to one of his speeches on the Greek crisis, Dr. Papadimitriou highlights his theory that there’s nothing more violent than corruption. In the same speech, he goes on reflecting that, “Counted in financial terms, corruption in the Greek political system equals the death of 16.000. Estimating the investment value of a human life at €3.5 million, one can easily come to the conclusion that the moderately calculated total of €60 billion of public money that was lost during the last thirty-year period by excessive spending and embezzlement practices, that is 20% of the national debt, corresponds to the cost of death of 16.000 people. In other words, the average Greek will die two months earlier than expected, only because they looted their fair share of millions of money. In any case, robbing population does not constitute a non-violent crime.”