Eva Tardos, Cornell University professor of computer science, has been awarded a 1999 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Winners of the prestigious Guggenheim fellowships for 1999 include 179 artists, scholars and scientists selected from nearly 2800 applicants on the basis of "distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment."

Tardos (pronounced TAR-dosh) will use her award of $33,000 for sabbatical research and study at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1999-2000 academic year. "There are a lot of exciting things going on in Berkeley both in the computer science division and at the International Computer Science Institute, which is affiliated with the university," she says. "I would like to thank the foundation very much for this opportunity to develop my career and area of research."

Tardos' research focuses on computing problems that arise in running networks -- especially high-speed communication networks like the Internet -- such as finding the best possible paths for information to follow. On a busy network with many users, the goal is to find a way to connect several points to several other points without having the connection paths interfere with one another. A computer that directs traffic on such a network has to analyze all the possible combinations of paths and decide which is the most efficient. This is often so complicated that even the fastest computers will take far too long to find an answer, so Tardos looks for approximations that will find useful solutions in a reasonable time.

"The approximation techniques discovered so far are limited," Tardos says. "A resolution of most of the open questions will probably require new ideas and new techniques."

She also works on the related problem of network design, where the goal is to find the most efficient way to lay out the paths between points. Here, Tardos says, computers can take their time in finding the ideal answer, but approximations are still needed to get the job done in days instead of centuries.

Tardos studied mathematics at the Eštvšs University in Budapest, Hungary, and received her Ph.D. in mathematics there in 1984. After teaching at Eštvšs University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she joined the Cornell faculty in 1989. During her years at Cornell, she has been awarded several prestigious fellowships. From 1990 to 1995, she was a David and Lucille Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering; from 1991 to 1993, she had a Sloan Fellowship; and from 1991 to 1996, she had a Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation. In May of 1998, she was elected a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

Tardos is a member of the editorial boards of several leading journals in her field of study, including the SIAM Journal on Computing, Combinatorica and Mathematics of Operations Research.

Guggenheim fellowships are awarded on the basis of recommendations made by panels of experts to the foundation's Committee of Selection. Since the program began in 1925, the foundation has granted more than $185 million to nearly 15,000 individuals. Former winners have included Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Linus Pauling, James Watson and Eudora Welty. Noted Cornell winners include renowned poet A.R. Ammons, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry and novelist Alison Lurie, professor emerita of English, and the late Vladimir Nabokov. David M. Lee, professor of physics and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics, received Guggenheim fellowships in 1966 and 1974.

In the last three years, Guggenheim fellowships at Cornell have gone to Persis S. Drell, associate professor of physics; Terence H. Irwin, the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy; P. Andrew Karplus, associate professor of biochemistry, molecular and cell biology; G. Peter Lepage, professor of physics; and Stephen A. Vavasis, associate professor of computer science.