in mathematics from St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1979, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh in 1988 under the supervision of Mark Jerrum.
Sinclair’s research interests include the design and analysis of randomized algorithms, computational applications of stochastic processes and nonlinear dynamical systems, Monte Carlo methods in statistical physics and combinatorial optimization.
This work has been highly influential in theoretical computer science and was recognised with the Gödel Prize in 1996.
[2] A refinement of these methods led to a fully polynomial time randomised approximation algorithm for computing the permanent, for which Sinclair and his co-authors received the Fulkerson Prize in 2006.
[3] Sinclair's initial forms part of the name of the GNRS conjecture on metric embeddings of minor-closed graph families.