Carnegie Mellon computer scientists and Turing Award recipients Manuel Blum, Edmund Clarke, Raj Reddy and Dana S. Scott are among 40 of the world's most distinguished computer scientists and mathematicians who are expected to participate in the newly established Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Sept. 22-27.

More than a third of all of the recipients of the Fields Medal, Abel Prize and Turing Award - the most prestigious awards in mathematics and computer science - have confirmed their attendance at the forum at Heidelberg University. The event's lectures and workshops will provide an opportunity for a select group of 200 young researchers from around the world to get to know the laureates.

Other Turing laureates among the participants include Leslie Valiant, formerly a CMU visiting assistant professor who now is at Harvard University, and CMU alumni Edward Feigenbaum, Shafi Goldwasser and Ivan Sutherland.

The forum was initiated by the Klaus Tschira Stiftung (KTS), a German foundation supporting the natural sciences, mathematics and computer science, and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies. It is organized in collaboration with the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Mathematical Union and the Norwegian Academy for Science and Letters. The forum is slated to be an annual event.

Reddy and Clarke are among the laureates who will present talks. Reddy will discuss, "Who Invented the Computer: Babbage, Atanasoff, Zuse, Turing or von Neumann?" while Clarke's topic is "Model Checking and the Curse of Dimensionality." Both will be presented on Sept. 23 and, as with all of the forum's lectures, will be live-streamed on the forum's website, http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org. An international team of bloggers also will report on the event in English and German.