John H. Halton

Professor of Computer Science

Contact Information

Home:
108 Carolina Forest
Chapel Hill, NC 27516

(919) 962-1752 (Voice)
(919) 962-1799 (Fax)
(919) 942-4856 (Home)

To send me e-mail, click here: halton@cs.unc.edu

Secretary: Jenni Styron
(919) 962-1858 (Voice)
styron@cs.unc.edu (e-mail)

Education

• B.A. 1953 (Cambridge)
• M.A. 1957 (Cambridge)
• D.Phil. 1960 (Oxford)

Honors

• Fellow, Cambridge Philosophical Society (F.C.P.S.), 1954.
• Fellow, Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications (F.I.M.A.), 1964.
• Fellow, British Computer Society (F.B.C.S.), 1980.

• Senior Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (S.M.I.E.E.E.), 1984.
• Chartered Engineer (C.Eng.), British Engineering Council, 1990.
• Chartered Mathematician (C.Math.), Institute of Mathematics Council, 1992.

Research Interests

Applications of combinatorial and probabilistic methods, and scientific and mathematical analysis, to computational, scientific, and engineering problems.

Combinatorial, probabilistic, geometric, and parallel algorithms. These are designed and analyzed for a variety of problems, such as the Traveling Salesman Problem, application of tree structure to computation, bin-packing, triangulation, and the Shoelace Problem.

Decision-making in applied science and engineering. Mathematical, statistical, and scientific methods are employed.

Mathematics and numerical analysis. Various problems relating to combinatorics, graphs, algebra, analysis, asymptotics, and geometry are investigated.

Absolute and probabilistic bounds on performance of complex systems. These include multicomputer algorithms, questions of scale, networking and communication paradigms, control schemes, debugging strategies, fault-tolerance and error-correction, distributed operating systems, and parallel languages.

PC boards and VLSI chips. The design of efficient layouts, and the efficient process of design of such circuits, are studied and analyzed.

Selected Publications

Halton, J. H. "On the Thickness of Graphs of Given Degree," Information Sciences, 54, 1991, 219-238.

Halton, J. H. "Pseudo-random Trees--Multiple Independent Sequence Generators for Parallel and Branching Computations," Journal of Computational Physics, 84, 1989, 1-56.

Halton, J. H. "The Properties of Random Trees," Information Sciences, 47, 1989, 95-133.

Halton, J. H. "On the Efficiency of Generalized Antithetic Transformations for Monte Carlo Integration," Nuclear Science and Engineering, 98, 1988, 299-316.

Halton, J. H., and R. Terada. "A Fast Algorithm for the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem, Optimal with Probability One," SIAM Journal on Computing, 11, 1982, 28-46.

Halton, J. H. "A Retrospective and Prospective Survey of the Monte Carlo Method," Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Review, 12, 1970, 1-63.

Halton, J. H., and S. K. Zaremba. "The Extreme and L2 Discrepancies of Some Plane Sets," Monatshefte fur Mathematik, 73, 1969, 316-328.

Halton, J. H. "On the Efficiency of Certain Quasi-random Sequences of Points in Evaluating Multi-dimensional Integrals," Numerische Mathematik, 2, 1960, 84-90.

Beardwood, J. E., J. H. Halton, and J. M. Hammersley. "The Shortest Path Through Many Points," Proc. Cambridge Philosophical Society, 55, 1959, 299-327.

Chairman, Examination Committee

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