Jon M. Kleinberg

Jon M. Kleinberg is the Tisch University Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. Elected 2007 (I:6). Member, National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. Recipient, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Kleinberg is best known for his work on networks and particularly for his HITS algorithm, which he developed while he was at IBM. HITS is an algorithm for web search that builds on the eigenvector-based methods used in algorithms and serves as the full scale model for PageRank by recognizing that web pages or sites should be considered necessary not only if they are linked to by many others (as in PageRank), but also if they link to many others. Kleinberg is also known for his work on algorithmic aspects of the small-world experiment. He was one of the first to realize that Stanley Milgram's famous "six degrees" letter-passing experiment implied not only that there are short paths between individuals in social networks but also that people seem to be good at finding those paths, an apparently simple observation that turns out to have profound implications for the structure of the networks in question. In 2013, Kleinberg received the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and in 2024, he received the 2024 World Laureate Associate Prize.