Magdalen Tutorial Fellow Professor Rahul Santhanam is one of seven University of Oxford researchers awarded European Research Council Advanced Grants for their cutting-edge research.
The ERC Advanced Grants competition, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, is one of the most prestigious and competitive funding schemes in the EU. It gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.
Professor Santhanam’s research focuses on the possibilities and limits of algorithms in a mathematical framework.
“The P vs NP question, and similar questions on the limits of algorithms’ complexity lower bounds, are widely acknowledged to be fundamental questions in theoretical computer science,” said Professor Santhanam. “Yet there has been little progress despite substantial effort.”
“More and more, it seems as though an indirect or rhizomatic approach could be more effective than a frontal attack. In the emerging area of meta-complexity, developed partly by me and my collaborators, complexity lower bounds have been connected to central notions in areas such as learning and cryptography.
“The approach in my ERC project aims to exploit these new connections, as well as the dialectical relationship between complexity lower bounds and logical barriers to proving lower bounds.”
Read more on the University of Oxford website.