World's Best Scientists 2026 revealed!

D-Index & Metrics

Computer Science

D-Index
54
Citations
16966
World Ranking
4461
National Ranking
2086

Research.com Recognitions

  • 2007 - ACM Fellow For contributions to complexity theory.

Overview

Lance Fortnow is affiliated with the Illinois Institute of Technology in the United States. Their main research contributions lie within the field of Computer Science, with a focus on computational theory, artificial intelligence, and aspects of law related to AI and intellectual property.

Their research spans a number of subfields including Computational Theory and Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, Political Science and International Relations, Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design, and Statistics and Probability.

Key topics addressed in their work cover Complexity and Algorithms in Graphs, Computability, Logic, AI Algorithms, Law, AI, and Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence in Law, Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture, Computational Geometry and Mesh Generation, and Advanced Graph Theory Research.

Their publication record includes several recent papers:

  • "Fifty years of P vs. NP and the possibility of the impossible," 2021, Communications of the ACM
  • "Worlds to Die Harder For Open Oracle Questions for the 21st Century," 2021, ACM SIGACT News
  • "The CFG Complexity of Singleton Sets," 2024, arXiv (Cornell University)

Frequent collaborators include Nancy S. Kim, C. N. P. Slagle, and William Gasarch. Nancy S. Kim has coauthored with Fortnow on multiple occasions.

Fortnow has published most frequently in venues such as arXiv (Cornell University), Communications of the ACM, ACM SIGACT News, SSRN Electronic Journal, and Comprehensive Physiology.

Among their recognitions, Fortnow was named an ACM Fellow in 2007 for contributions to complexity theory.

Best Publications

  • Algebraic methods for interactive proof systems

    Carsten Lund;Lance Fortnow;Howard Karloff;Noam Nisan

  • Non-deterministic exponential time has two-prover interactive protocols

    L. Babai;L. Babai;L. Fortnow;C. Lund

  • Checking computations in polylogarithmic time

    László Babai;Lance Fortnow;Leonid A. Levin;Mario Szegedy

  • Infeasibility of instance compression and succinct PCPs for NP

    Lance Fortnow;Rahul Santhanam

  • The status of the P versus NP problem

    Lance Fortnow

  • Non-deterministic exponential time has two-prover interactive protocols

    Unknown

  • BPP has subexponential time simulations unless EXPTIME has publishable proofs

    László Babai;Lance Fortnow;Noam Nisan;Avi Wigderson

  • On the power of multi-prover interactive protocols

    Lance Fortnow;John Rompel;Michael Sipser

  • The complexity of perfect zero-knowledge

    L. Fortnow

  • Gap-definable counting classes

    Stephen A. Fenner;Lance J. Fortnow;Stuart A. Kurtz

  • Testing that distributions are close

    T. Batu;L. Fortnow;R. Rubinfeld;W.D. Smith

  • Testing random variables for independence and identity

    T. Batu;E. Fischer;L. Fortnow;R. Kumar

  • Nondeterministic exponential time has two-prover interactive protocols

    L. Babai;L. Fortnow;C. Lund

  • Algebraic methods for interactive proof systems

    C. Lund;L. Fortnow;H. Karloff;N. Nisan

  • Random-self-reducibility of complete sets

    Joan Feigenbaum;Lance Fortnow

  • Proceedings of the 40th annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing

    Lance Fortnow;Rahul Santhanam

  • Complexity Limitations on Quantum Computation

    Lance Fortnow;John Rogers

  • Computational Identification of Operons in Microbial Genomes

    Yu Zheng;Joseph D. Szustakowski;Lance Fortnow;Richard J. Roberts

  • On the power of multi-power interactive protocols

    L. Fortnow;J. Rompel;M. Sipser

  • A Short History of Computational Complexity

    Lance Fortnow;Steven Homer

  • Errata for On the Power of Multi-Prover Interactive Protocols.

    Lance Fortnow;John Rompel;Michael Sipser

Frequent Co-Authors

Harry Buhrman
Harry Buhrman University of Amsterdam
Richard Beigel
Richard Beigel Temple University
László Babai
László Babai University of Chicago
Adam R. Klivans
Adam R. Klivans The University of Texas at Austin
Joan Feigenbaum
Joan Feigenbaum Yale University
Carsten Lund
Carsten Lund AT&T (United States)
Yiling Chen
Yiling Chen Harvard University
Russell Impagliazzo
Russell Impagliazzo University of California, San Diego
Noam Nisan
Noam Nisan Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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