Biography of David A. Plaisted

Prof. Plaisted was born in Pennsylvania. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. He served on the faculty of the computer science department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 1984, and since then has been a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prof. Plaisted has authored or co-authored numerous publications in a variety of fields of computer science including NP-completeness, algorithms, term-rewriting systems, and theorem proving. He has also co-authored a 1997 book on the efficiency of theorem proving strategies. Prof. Plaisted was co-chair of the Second International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications in 1987 and the local arrangements chair of the Third International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1989. Prof. Plaisted has served on the organizing committee of RTA and on a number of CADE, RTA, and other program committees and on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including the Journal of Symbolic Computation, Information Processing Letters, Mathematical Systems Theory, and Fundamenta Informaticae. Prof. Plaisted spent a sabbatical at SRI in Menlo Park, California in 1982 and 1983 and another at the Max-Planck Institute and the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany in 1993 and 1994. He also spent two months in France in the summer of 1998, visiting groups in Grenoble and Nancy. His research accomplishments in theorem proving include work on the recursive path ordering, the associative path ordering, abstraction, the simplified and modified problem reduction formats, ground reducibility, nonstandard clause form translations, rigid E-unification, Knuth-Bendix completion, replacement rules in theorem proving, instance-based theorem proving strategies, and semantics in theorem proving. Prof. Plaisted is married and has two children. His hobbies include hiking, playing musical instruments, cooking, foreign languages, bird watching, promoting democracy, and listening to the short-wave radio.