David Wolpert

David H. Wolpert is an American mathematician, physicist and computer scientist. He is a professor at Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of three books, three patents, over one hundred refereed papers, and has received numerous awards. His name is particularly associated with a group of theorems in computer science known as "no free lunch".

David Wolpert took a B.A. in Physics at Princeton University (1984), then attended the University of California at Santa Barbara where he took the degrees of M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1989).

Between 1989 and 1997 he pursued a research career at Los Alamos National Laboratory, IBM, TXN Inc. and Santa Fe Institute.

From 1997 to 2011 he worked as senior computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, and became visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute.

He spent the year 2010-11 as Ulam Scholar at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos.

He joined the faculty of Santa Fe Institute in 2011 and became a professor there in September 2013.

His research interests have included statistics, game theory, machine learning applications, information theory, optimization methods and complex systems theory.

One of Wolpert’s most discussed achievements is known as No free lunch in search and optimization. By this theorem, all algorithms for search and optimization perform equally well averaged over all problems in the class with which they are designed to deal. The theorem holds only under certain conditions that are not often encountered precisely in real life, although it has been claimed that the conditions can be met approximately. The theorem lies within the domain of computer science, but a weaker version known as the “folkloric no free lunch theorem” has been drawn upon by William A. Dembski in support of intelligent design. This use of the theorem has been rejected by Wolpert himself and others

...
Wikipedia