Prestigious STOC Test of Time Award to Mikkel Thorup

At the ACM Symposion on the theory of Computing (STOC), Mikkel Thorup and Uri Zwick received a 20-Year STOC Test of Time Award for their article "Approximate Distance Oracles" from STOC  2001 (https://sigact.org/prizes/stoc_tot.html). The winners are selected by a committee appointed by the SIGACT Executive Committee with  particular attention to long-term impact. 

The paper "Approximate Distance Oracles" gives a fundamental trade-off between space and precision for storing distance metrics. For any integer parameter k, if we allow distances to be overestimated or stretched by up to a factor 2k-1, they can be represented using O(kn^{1+1/k}) space, and these estimates can be found in O(k) time. A full journal version has been published in Journal of the ACM https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1044731.1044732