Ryan

Ryan may refer to:

People and fictional characters

Places

Film, radio, television and web

Other uses

Comedy

In a modern sense, comedy (from the Greek: κωμῳδία, kōmōidía) refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or to amuse by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film and stand-up comedy. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old". A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.

Mike Paterson

Michael Stewart "Mike" Paterson, is a British Computer Scientist, who was the director of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Warwick until 2007, and chair of the Department of Computer Science in 2005.

He received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1967, under the supervision of David Park. He spent three years at MIT and moved to University of Warwick in 1971.

Paterson is an expert on theoretical computer science with more than 100 publications, especially the design and analysis of algorithms and computational complexity. Paterson’s distinguished career was recognised with the EATCS Award in 2006 and a workshop in honour of his 66th birthday in 2008, including contributions of several Turing Award and Gödel Prize laureates. For his work on distributed computing with Fischer and Lynch, he received the Dijkstra Prize in 2001, and his work with Dyer and Goldberg on counting graph homomorphisms received a best paper award at the ICALP conference in 2006. Mike Paterson received a Lester R. Ford Award in 2010. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society since 2001 and been president of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). According to EATCS president Maurice Nivat, Paterson played a great role in the late 1960s in the recognition of computer science as a science, “and that theoretical computer science, which is very close to mathematics but distinct in its motivation and inspiration, is indeed a challenging and fruitful field of research.”