| Mihai Pătrașcu | |
| Birth Date: | 17 July 1982 |
| Birth Place: | Craiova, Romania |
| Death Place: | New York City, United States |
| Resting Place: | Craiova |
| Work Institution: | AT&T Labs |
| Alma Mater: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Erik Demaine |
| Thesis Title: | Lower bound techniques for data structures |
| Thesis Year: | 2008 |
| Thesis Url: | http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/45866 |
Mihai Pătrașcu (17 July 1982 – 5 June 2012) was a Romanian-American computer scientist at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey, USA.[1]
Pătrașcu attended Carol I National College in Craiova.[2] As a high school student, he won 2 gold medals and 1 silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics.[3] After attended for one year the University of Craiova, he completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Under the supervision of Erik Demaine, he defended his MS and PhD theses in 2007 and 2008 respectively.
Pătrașcu’s work was concerned with fundamental questions about basic data structures. He received the Machtey Award for the best student paper at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science in 2008, and the Presburger Award from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science in 2012, for breaking "many old barriers on fundamental data structure problems, not only revitalizing but also revolutionizing a field that was almost silent for over a decade."[4]
Mihai Pătrașcu died in 2012 at the age of 29 after suffering from brain cancer for a year and a half,[5] [6] and was buried in his native city, Craiova.[7]