Tanel Tammet

Tanel Tammet is an Estonian computer scientist, professor and software engineer. He was also one of the founding members of the Estonian Greens party and helped found the IT College in Tallinn.

Life and career

Born in 1965, Tammet had early access to the University of Tartu's computers through his father's work at the physics department. As a result, he eventually graduated the university's maths department in applied mathematics, specializing in information technology. He took interest in automated theorem proving and graduated the Gothenburg Chalmers University of Technology in with a Ph.D. in 1992. He lived in Sweden for the most part of that decade, then returned to Tallinn.

Tammet received international renown for his automated theorem proving program Gandalf, which won different categories of the CADE CASC competition six times between 1997 and 2003. He has been the Estonian delegate to the Information Systems Technology Panel of the NATO Research and Technology Organisation and written about cyber security. He often teaches or speaks about artificial intelligence and has asserted that it already exists, albeit in a primitive and distributed form.