Shayan Oveis Qarn; the young scientist who broke the 50-year barrier in computer science

Shayan Oveis Qarn; the young scientist who broke the 50-year barrier in computer science

🔸Shayan Oveis Qarn, an Iranian researcher in computer science and a university professor at Washington, has received the 2026 Abbott (Abacus) Medal of the International Mathematical Union; an award that goes to outstanding research achievements by young researchers in the fields of computer science mathematics.

🔸The award committee says that Oveis Qarn has expanded the way algorithms are analyzed by introducing tools from fields such as polynomial geometry, probability theory, and graph spectral theory, and has opened up new ways to solve several longstanding problems in computer science.

🔸Oveis’s research has especially drawn attention in two areas: finding near-optimal paths and random sampling from very large and complex sets.

🔸The Abacus Medal is awarded once every four years, continuing an award that until 2018 was known as the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize. A nominee for the award must be under 40 years of age at the beginning of the year in which the World Congress of Mathematicians is held.

🔸This prize is considered one of the most important international honors in theoretical computer science.

🔸The significance of Oveis Qarn’s work is not only explained by listing specialized terms. An important part of his scientific path goes back to one of computer science’s best-known questions: how to find the shortest possible route for traveling among several cities and, at the end, return to the starting point?

🔸This question, known as the “Travelling Salesman Problem,” appears simple. A seller, driver, or delivery agent must pass through several cities or destinations, visit each one exactly once, and return to the first point. As the number of destinations increases, the number of possible routes grows so rapidly that checking them all is practically impossible.

🔸In such cases, instead of seeking an exact answer, researchers want an algorithm that finds a route close to the best possible one within a reasonable time and that can be guaranteed not to be worse than a certain limit.

🔸Since 1976, the Christofides algorithm has been the main standard for the symmetric version of this problem. This method guaranteed that the length of the proposed route would be at most one and a half times the length of the shortest possible route. For nearly half a century, no algorithm had been able to improve that guarantee, even by a small amount.

🔸Read the full version of this report on the Radio Farda website.