Gregory Chaitin is an Argentine-American mathematician living in Rio de Janeiro, and a lifetime honorary professor of the University of Buenos Aires with an honorary doctorate in philosophy from the University of Córdoba, the oldest university in Argentina and one of the oldest in South America. He was formerly at the IBM Watson Research Center where he was part of a small team that developed the Power processor architecture and its associated software.
On the theoretical side, Chaitin has been called "le Gödel de l'informatique" because he extends Gödel and Turing's work on incompleteness by considering the size of computer programs and because of his discovery of the halting probability — for which was awarded the Leibniz Medallion by Wolfram Research in 2007. He has also proposed modeling evolution as a random walk in software space ("metabiology").
Among his books are: Algorithmic Information Theory; Conversations with a Mathematician; Meta Math!; and Proving Darwin.
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