Umans studied at Williams College, where he completed a BA degree in Mathematics and Computer Science in 1996.
He then received a PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley in 2000 under Christos Papadimitriou.
He has made notable contributions to varied areas within this space including random number generation, expanders, and algorithms for matrix multiplication.
[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] In 2008, Umans and his student Dave Buchfuhrer settled a 1979 conjecture on the complexity of unbounded Boolean formula minimization; the result won a best paper award at ICALP.
[8] Umans received an NSF CAREER award in 2004 and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2005.