Biography

Dennis Shasha is a professor of computer science at the
Courant Institute of NYU where he works with biologists on
pattern discovery for microarrays,
combinatorial design, and network inference;
and with physicists and financial people on algorithms
for time series. Other areas of interest include database
tuning, tree and graph matching, and cryptographic file systems.
Because he likes to type, he has written
four books of puzzles, a biography about
great computer scientists,
and technical books about database tuning, biological
pattern recognition and time series.
He also writes the puzzle columns for Scientific American
and Dr. Dobb's Journal.

After graduating from Yale in 1977, he worked
for IBM designing circuits and microcode for the 3090.
He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1984 (thesis advisor: Nat Goodman).
Since he enjoys typing, he has written a few books, including
a professional reference book
{\em Database Tuning: principles, experiments,
and troubleshooting techniques} (2002, Morgan Kaufmann),
four books about a mathematical detective named Dr. Ecco entitled
{\em The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco} (1988, Freeman, and republished
in 1998 by Dover), {\em Codes,
Puzzles, and Conspiracy} (1992, Freeman, republished in 2004 by Dover),
{\em Dr. Ecco's Cyberpuzzles} (2002, W. W. Norton),
{\em Puzzling Adventures} (2004, W. W. Norton),
a book of biographies about great computer scientists called
{\em Out of Their Minds: the lives and discoveries of 15 great
computer scientists} (with Cathy Lazere)(1995, Copernicus/Springer-Verlag), 
{\em Pattern Discovery in Biomolecular Data:
Tools, Techniques, and Applications}        
published in 1999 by
Oxford University Press, and
{\em High Performance Discovery in Time Series: techniques and case studies} 
(with Yunyue Zhu)
Springer Verlag Publishers, June 2004. 
In addition,
he has co-authored
fifty journal papers, 
sixty conference papers, and seven patents.
He writes a monthly puzzle column for
Scientific American and Dr. Dobb's Journal.