Arto Salomaa

Arto Salomaa
Arto Salomaa in 2005.
Born	(1934-06-06) 6 June 1934 (age 82) Turku, Finland
Nationality	Finnish
Fields	Mathematics Computer science
Institutions	Turun Yliopisto
Alma mater	Turun Yliopisto
Doctoral advisor	Kustaa Inkeri
Doctoral students	Neil Jones Juhani Karhumäki Jarkko Kari Lila Kari Mogens Nielsen Sven Skyum Paul Vitanyi

Arto K. Salomaa (born 6 June 1934) is a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist. His research career, which spans over forty years, is focused on formal languages and automata theory.

Salomaa was born in Turku, Finland on June 6, 1934. He earned a Bachelor's degree from University of Turku in 1954 and a PhD from the same university in 1960. Salomaa's father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Turku. Salomaa was introduced to the theory of automata and formal languages during seminars at Berkeley given by John Myhill in 1957.

In 1965, Salomaa became a professor of mathematics at the University of Turku, a position he retired from in 1999. He also spent two years in the late 1960s at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada, and two years in the 1970s at the University of Aarhus in Aarhus, Denmark.

Salomaa was president of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science from 1979 until 1985.

Salomaa has authored or co-authored 46 textbooks, including "Theory of Automata" (1969), "Formal Languages" (1973), "The Mathematical Theory of L-Systems" (1980, with Grzegorz Rozenberg), "Jewels of Formal Language Theory" (1981) "Public-Key Cryptography" (1990) and "DNA Computing" (1998, with Grzegorz Rozenberg and Gheorghe Paun). With Rozenberg, Salomaa edited "Handbook of Formal Languages" (1997), a 3-volume, 2000-page reference on formal language theory. These books have often become standard references in their respective areas. For example, "Formal Languages" was reported in 1991 to be among the 100 most cited texts in mathematics.