Takao Nishizeki

Takao Nishizeki (西関 隆夫) was a Japanese mathematician and computer scientist who specialized in graph algorithms and graph drawing.

Nishizeki was born in 1947 in Fukushima, and was a student at Tohoku University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1969, a master's in 1971, and a doctorate in 1974.

He continued at Tohoku as a faculty member, and became a full professor there in 1988.

In 1990, Nishizeki founded the annual International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC).

In 1996, he became a life fellow of the IEEE "for contributions to graph algorithms with applications to physical design of electronic systems."

In 1996 he was selected as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for planar graphs, network flows and VLSI routing".

Nishizeki was also a foreign fellow of the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences; one of his students and frequent co-authors, Md. Saidur Rahman, is from Bangladesh.

At the 18th ISAAC symposium, in 2007, a workshop was held to celebrate his 60th birthday.

He was the Dean of the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, from April 2008 to March 2010.

He retired in 2010, becoming a professor emeritus at Tohoku University, but continued teaching as a professor at Kwansei Gakuin University until March 2015.

He was an Auditor of Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology from April 2016 to October 2018.

Nishizeki made significant contributions to algorithms for series–parallel graphs, finding cliques in sparse graphs, planarity testing and the secret sharing with any access structure.

He is the co-author of two books on planar graphs and graph drawing.