Event Fetes Prasad Tetali's Impact on Boundary-Crossing Math

The math community recently celebrated Prasad Tetali, Alexander M. Knaster Professor and head of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University's Mellon College of Science.

Students relaxing and chatting with each other during a classroom break, sharing smiles and casual conversation. — TetFest60 was hosted by Georgia Tech and attracted mathematicians from across the country.

Georgia Tech, where Tetali taught from 1994-2021, hosted TetFest60, a 2-day workshop on the rich interplay between randomness, algorithms and discrete mathematics with a view toward the history of how these topics came together and flourished and exciting future directions and challenges. The workshop took place in September prior to the RANDOM-APPROX conference and focused on the many research directions influenced by Tetali's career. Speakers included those who have worked with and learned from Tetali.

Organizers for the event were Will Perkins, associate professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech; Santosh Vempala, Frederick P. Storey II chair at Geogria Tech; and Fran Kendrick. TetFest60 was supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Schools of Mathematics, Computer Science and the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Professor standing at the front of a classroom, presenting a lecture using a projector, with slides displayed on the screen. — Will Perkins, associate professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, discussed the problem of efficiently sampling from spin systems on graphs with global cardinality constraints.

Tetali has published more than 100 research papers and given numerous invited lectures in his fields of expertise. Among his research honors, Tetali was named a fellow of both the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Tetali earned his bachelor's degree from Andhra University in India, his master's degree in computer science and automation from the Indian Institute of Science and his doctoral degree from New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He completed postdoctoral work at AT&T Bell Labs.