The fourth Salomaa Prize awarded to Juhani Karhumäki
An International Conference Series “Developments in Language Theory” (DLT) awards the Salomaa Prize annually to a researcher who has advanced automata theory. This year the DLT conference was organized in May at the University of South Florida, where the Salomaa Prize was awarded to professor emeritus Juhani Karhumäki from the University of Turku.
The Salomaa Prize is named to honour the scientific achievements and influence of Academician Arto Salomaa, a founder of the DLT symposium and a long-time Professor of Mathematics at the University of Turku. DLT, which awards the prize annually, is the leading scientific conference in automata theory in the world. The Salomaa Prize is the only distinguished international prize in this field of science.
Professor Juhani Karhumäki has been working as a professor of mathematics at the Univeristy of Turku for a long time and has researched and advanced the automata theory from various angles, such as string of characters and combinatorics of words.
– I have been working with this theory for about 40 years and it's been practically my whole life. As this is a very respected prize awarded by an international panel of top researchers, I very much appreciate this recognition, professor Juhani Karhumäki says.
The Salomaa Prize is funded by the University of Turku and the selection of the winner is decided by an international selection committee appointed by the DLT conference series. The chair of the committee this year is professor Juraj Hromkovič (ETH Zürich, Switzerland).
Arto Salomaa is a Finnish mathematician, who was the Professor of Mathematics at the University of Turku for over three decades in 1966-1999. He is considered to be one of the founders of the automata theory. Foundations of automata theory was laid down in 1950s. Since then the theory has become a mature scientific discipline and it is often seen as a cornerstone of theoretical computer science.
The Salomaa Prize was created in 2018.
