Michael J. Fischer

Michael John Fischer (born 1942) is a computer scientist who works in the fields of distributed computing, parallel computing, cryptography, algorithms and data structures, and computational complexity.

Fischer was born in 1942 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. He received his BSc degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1963. Fischer did his MA and PhD studies in applied mathematics at Harvard University; he received his MA degree in 1965 and PhD in 1968. Fischer's PhD supervisor at Harvard was Sheila Greibach.

After receiving his PhD, Fischer was an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1968–1969, an assistant professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1969–1973, and an associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT in 1973–1975. At MIT he supervised doctoral students who became prominent computer scientists, including David S. Johnson, Frances Yao, and Michael Hammer.

In 1975, Fischer was nominated as a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. Since 1981, he has been a professor of computer science at Yale University. Fischer served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM in 1982–1986. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1996.