Thomas Colcombet
French theoretical computer scientist

Thomas Colcombet (born March 6, 1975) is a French theoretical computer scientist known for settling major open problems on tree walking automata jointly with Mikołaj Bojańczyk. Colcombet is currently a CNRS Research Director at Paris Cité University.
Biography
Colcombet earned his undergraduate degree from École normale supérieure de Lyon (2000) and his doctorate from University of Rennes 1 (2004). Since 2004, he is a CNRS researcher, and a Research Director since 2016. He received the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2010.
Besides his work on tree walking automata, Colcombet contributed to ω-automata, particularly to state complexity of Büchi automata, and to various topics in logic in computer science.
He was involved in the development of the videogame Liquid War.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Colcombet” 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.