[4][1][5][6][7][8] Papadimitriou studied at the National Technical University of Athens, where in 1972 he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in electrical engineering.

He then pursued graduate studies at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1976 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The complexity of combinatorial optimization problems.

During the 36th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2009), there was a special event honoring Papadimitriou's contributions to computer science.

He has also co-authored the textbook Algorithms (2006) with Sanjoy Dasgupta and Umesh Vazirani, and the graphic novel Logicomix (2009)[16] with Apostolos Doxiadis.

His name was listed in the 19th position on the CiteSeer search engine academic database and digital library[citation needed].