Robert Sedgewick, PhD

Robert Sedgewick is the founding chair and the William O. Baker Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University.

He was a member of the board of directors of Adobe Systems from 1990 to 2016, served on the faculty at Brown University from 1975 to 1985, and has held visiting research positions at Xerox PARC, IDA, and INRIA. His research expertise is in algorithm science, data structures, and analytic combinatorics.

He pioneered algorithm visualization and has been active throughout his career in developing a first-year college curriculum in computer science, exploiting technology to make that curriculum available to anyone seeking the opportunity to learn from it.

Prof. Sedgewick is the author of twenty books, many of which have been used for decades around the world as textbooks and reference works. He is best known for his Algorithms textbooks, which have been bestsellers since the 1980s and have served generations of students, programmers, and developers. His 2008 book with Philippe Flajolet, Analytic Combinatorics, defines the field and was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize for mathematical exposition by the American Mathematical Society.

Since massive open online courses (MOOCs) appeared on the scene in 2012, Sedgewick has been a leading figure in developing them and exploring ways to expand their effectiveness. His six courses on various platforms include some of the most popular on the web. With Kevin Wayne, he developed a scalable model that integrates the textbook, studio-produced online lectures, and extensive online content. Their most popular projects are Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach and Algorithms which support teaching and learning for first-year computer science courses and have reached millions worldwide.