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Mihai Pătrașcu (computer scientist)

Romanian computer scientist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ6845108 ↗
Source-derived summary

Mihai Pătrașcu (17 July 1982 – 5 June 2012) was a Romanian-American computer scientist at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey, United States.

Pătrașcu attended Carol I National College in Craiova.

As a high school student, he won 2 gold medals and 1 silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics. After attending for one year the University of Craiova, he completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Under the supervision of Erik Demaine, he defended his MS and PhD theses in 2007 and 2008 respectively.

Pătrașcu’s work was concerned with fundamental questions about basic data structures. He received the Machtey Award for the best student paper at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science in 2008, and the Presburger Award from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science in 2012, for breaking "many old barriers on fundamental data structure problems, not only revitalizing but also revolutionizing a field that was almost silent for over a decade."

Mihai Pătrașcu died in 2012 at the age of 29 after suffering from brain cancer for a year and a half, and was buried in his native city, Craiova.

Selected publications

Chan, Timothy M.; Pătrașcu, Mihai; Roditty, Liam (2011). "Dynamic connectivity: connecting to networks and geometry" (PDF). SIAM Journal on Computing.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mihai Pătrașcu (computer scientist)” is romanian computer scientist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mihai, Pătrașcu and computer, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1982, 2012, 2007, 2008—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1982-07-17. For this dossier, Mihai, Pătrașcu and computer is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “romanian computer scientist” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6845108. VIAF identifies the subject as 29303358. The Library of Congress control number is no2007023136. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 2012, 2007 and 2008.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Mihai Pătrașcu (computer scientist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.