Major Contributions
A number of well-known algorithms bear Pratt's name. Pratt certificates, short proofs of the primality of a number, demonstrated in a practical way that primality can be efficiently verified, placing the primality testing problem in the complexity class NP and providing the first strong evidence that the problem is not co-NP-complete. The Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm, which Pratt designed in the early 1970s together with fellow Stanford professor Donald Knuth and independently from Morris, is still the most efficient general string searching algorithm known today. Along with Blum, Floyd, Rivest, and Tarjan, he described the first worst-case optimal selection algorithm.
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