Christos H. Papadimitriou was born and grew up in Greece. He studied electrical engineering at the National Technical University, Athens, and then was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science, from Princeton. After teaching at Harvard, MIT and Stanford, he now holds the Lester C. Hogan Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. Christos's research work is in the theory of algorithms, computational complexity and game theory, fields in which he is one of the leading international experts. He has published over three hundred original articles in leading scientific journals, which have received, to date, over twenty-five thousand citations. His books, Elements of the Theory of Computation, Computational Complexity and Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity, are the standard textbooks in their fields, while his first novel, Turing, was published in 2003 by MIT Press. Christos is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, and has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates and other distinctions, among them the prestigious Charles Babbage Prize. He also plays the keyboards in a rock band.