Michael Garey PhD’70 receives 2026 Distinguished Achievement Award

By Rachel Robey Honoring alumnus Michael Garey, former director of math research at Bell Labs, for contributions in research, leadership, and education. Doing the bold thing, even just once or twice, has the potential to change your life. In fact, alumnus Michael Garey PhD’70, former director of Bell Labs’ Mathematical Sciences Research Center, owes his career to it.   Two uncharacteristic moments of boldness in his early career — contacting Ed Moore (the pioneer of automata theory who went on to be Garey’s advisor at UW–Madison) and, later, ringing up Bell Labs to kindly request a job interview — precipitated what is perhaps his best-known achievement: Computers and Intractability, the seminal book he co-authored with David Johnson.  In recognition of his contributions, Garey has received the 2026 Distinguished Achievement Award from the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One of just eight individuals to receive this year’s award, Garey and the remaining 2026 Distinguished Achievement Awardees exemplify excellence across research, leadership, and education.  Computers and Intractability Published in 1979, Computers and Intractability remains the first (and only) book dedicated to the theory of NP-completeness and computational intractability. Beyond being one of the “most referred to” texts on computational complexity, it’s also regularly included as one of the top 100 books in computer science altogether.  Most of Garey’s career was spent on proving algorithms were “practically impossible,” meaning they were too hard to solve precisely in any reasonable amount of time. Computers and Intractability helped others do the same, guiding readers through how to recognize NP-complete problems.  So what do you when things are “practically” impossible? “You try to do more approximate things,” explains Garey. “You do what you can in the time afforded to you.”  For Garey, that was a lifetime of leadership. After leaving UW–Madison in 1970, he made “an incredibly bold move for me, a rather shy and inexperienced kid from the Midwest”: he reached out to Bill Boyce, a department head in Bell Labs’ Math Center, to suggest a job interview. “I told him I was in New Jersey for an interview with RCA Labs, and, since I was here anyway, perhaps Bell Labs would also like to interview me,” he says. “Getting hired at Bell Labs in Research felt to me like I had won a big prize.”  Garey stayed at Bell Labs until 1999, serving as director of math research for his last eleven years there.  Beginnings at UW–Madison In 1966, when the Department of Computer Sciences was just two years old, Garey was a junior in UW–Madison’s math department. In desperate need of a topic for his senior honors thesis, he attended a talk on “self-reproducing machines” by Edward F. Moore,  the famous Bell Labs mathematician and inventor of the Moore finite state machine.  “I wrote a letter to Dr. Moore, expressing interest in learning more about the topic and inquiring as whether or not there might be somebody at Wisconsin who could supervise me,” said Garey in his retirement remarks 27 years ago. “He wrote back that, ‘fortunately,’ he would be coming to Wisconsin the very next year to join the faculty, taking a joint appointment in math and CS, and would be delighted to supervise me himself.”  Garey was introduced to discrete math through the computer science department, and it was at this point that the math major “finally became excited about doing mathematics.” He went on to complete his PhD in Computer Sciences, also under Moore. As a nod to his advisor, his thesis focused on the game “twenty questions.” (“This was an obsession of many Bell Labs mathematicians who played it over lunchtime,” he explains.)   Garey retired in 1999, using his time since to travel widely with wife Jenene Gail: “I’ve been to Antarctica twice, the Arctic three or four times, Greenland, Tasmania, and so on,” he says, “but my top place is Egypt.” ____________________________________ Read about all the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences Distinguished Achievement Awardees here.