Halpern graduated in 1975 from
University of Toronto with a B.S. in mathematics. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from
Harvard University in 1981 under the supervision of
Albert R. Meyer and
Gerald Sacks. He has written three books,
Actual Causality,
Reasoning about Uncertainty, and
Reasoning About Knowledge and won the 1997
Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science and the 2009
Dijkstra Prize in distributed computing. In 1993, Halpern was elected as a Fellow of the
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for sustained excellence in theoretical research on the logics of and relationships among knowledge, common knowledge, belief and probability. From 1997 to 2003, he was editor-in-chief of the
Journal of the ACM. In 2002, he was inducted as a
Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery and in 2012 he was selected as an
IEEE Fellow. In 2011, he was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Zukunftskolleg at the
University of Konstanz. In 2019, Halpern was elected a member of the
National Academy of Engineering for methods of reasoning about knowledge, belief, and uncertainty and their applications to distributed computing and multiagent systems. Halpern was also the administrator for the Computing Research Repository, the computer science branch of
arXiv.org, and the moderator for the "general literature" and "other" subsections of the repository. His students include
Nir Friedman,
Daphne Koller, and
Yoram Moses. Halpern died on February 13, 2026, at the age of 72. ==References==