Paul Michael Béla Vitányi (born 21 July 1944) is a Dutch computer scientist, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.

Vitányi was born in Budapest to a Dutch mother and a Hungarian father.

[1] Vitányi was appointed professor of computer science at the University of Amsterdam, and researcher at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands (CWI) where he is currently a CWI Fellow.

[8] They co-authored the textbook An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications,[9] parts of which have been translated into Chinese, Russian and Japanese.

The textbook received the William Holmes McGuffey Longevity Award[10] of the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA) (2020), and the Chinese translation[11] received the National Outstanding Scientific and Technological Book Award of the People's Republic of China (1999).