The Gödel prize, sponsored jointly by ACM SIGACT, recognizes outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science.  This year, the Gödel Prize has been awarded to YINS co-director Dan Spielman and his long time co-author Shang-Hua Teng for their series of papers on nearly-linear-time Laplacian solvers. Their work resolved an outstanding open problem in numerical linear algebra and delivered a new and extremely powerful algorithmic primitive: nearly linear time electrical flow computations.