Les Valiant has been awarded the Turing Award

I see on the ACM's website that Professor Leslie Valiant has been awarded this year's Turing Award, and will deliver the annual Turing Award lecture this June.

Here's the ACM release describing the award, and here's a nice document from 25 years ago summing up many of the fascinating things he'd done even then.

I never met Professor Valiant, but I studied a number of his papers in the early 1980's in my undergraduate computational complexity class. At the time that I got my copy of Garey and Johnson, the references section listed The complexity of computing the permanent as "to appear". I remember in those days we used to get photocopies of review pre-prints of interesting articles from our instructor, though I can't recall if any of his articles were among those.

Congratulations on an award long deserved, Professor Valiant!