Lance Fortnow

Lance Fortnow is a computer scientist who studies the limits of what computers can do. His landmark results on interactive proofs—showing how a skeptic can be convinced of the answer to a very hard problem through a short exchange of questions—reshaped theoretical computer science and underpin the zero-knowledge proof methods now used in cryptography. 

Lance’s career spans more than 35 years of research, teaching, and academic leadership. He was a professor at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University and chair of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. In 2019 he returned to Chicago as dean of the College of Science at Illinois Institute of Technology, then founded its College of Computing and served as inaugural dean through 2025, launching degrees in artificial intelligence, data science, and cybersecurity. He returned to the faculty in 2025 and spent early 2026 as a visiting fellow at Oxford’s Magdalen College. 

An ACM Fellow, NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands, Lance has chaired ACM SIGACT and served on the Computing Research Association board. In 2002 he founded the Computational Complexity blog, the first major weblog in the field, which he still writes with co-author Bill Gasarch. His survey of the P versus NP problem is among the most downloaded articles in Communications of the ACM and grew into his book The Golden Ticket (Princeton University Press). 

His current work asks how artificial intelligence changes the way we think about computation. Lance holds a B.A. in mathematics and computer science from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT.