Avi Wigderson (; born 9 September 1956) is an Israeli

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

in Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America. His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms,

graph theory In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of ''graph (discrete mathematics), graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of ''Vertex (graph ...

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (cryptography), ...

, and

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

. Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in

theoretical computer science Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the Abstraction, abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The Associati ...

. He also received the 2023

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...

for his contributions to the understanding of randomness in the theory of computation.

Early life and studies

Avi Wigderson was born in

Haifa Haifa ( ; , ; ) is the List of cities in Israel, third-largest city in Israel—after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—with a population of in . The city of Haifa forms part of the Haifa metropolitan area, the third-most populous metropolitan area i ...

, Israel, to Holocaust survivors. Wigderson is a graduate of the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa. He began his undergraduate studies at the Technion in 1977 in

, graduating in 1980. Heidelberg Laureate Foundation Portraits, interview with Avi Wigderson, 2017. In the Technion he met his wife Edna. He went on to graduate study at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1983 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Studies in computational complexity", under the supervision of Richard Lipton. He is credited with significantly expanding the field of computational complexity.

Academic career

After short-term positions at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, the IBM Almaden Research Center in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially the City of San José ( ; ), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is ...

, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, he returned to Israel and joined the faculty of the Hebrew University in 1986. He received tenure in 1987 and became a full professor in 1991. In 1999 he also took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, and in 2003 he gave up his Hebrew University position to take up full-time residence at the IAS.Short biography
from Wigderson's web site, retrieved 3 May 2010. Wigderson investigated computational questions and specifically the role of randomness in the field. Wigderson together with Noam Nisan and Russell Impagliazzo discovered that for algorithms that solve problems through coin flipping, there exists an algorithm that is almost as fast that does not use coin flipping as long as presets are met. Wigderson developed the Zig Zag product together with Omer Reingold and Salil Vadhan, the Zig Zag product links complexity theory, graph theory and group theory. The Zig Zag product for example can help one understand how to get out of a maze. Today complexity theory is used in cryptography. Wigderson with Silvio Micali and Oded Goldreich demonstrated that zero-knowledge proofs can be utilized in proving public results on secret data in secret.

Awards and honors

* 1994: Nevanlinna Prize for his work on computational complexity. * 2009: The Gödel Prize for work on the zig-zag product of graphs, a method of combining smaller graphs to produce larger ones used in the construction of

expander graph In graph theory, an expander graph is a sparse graph that has strong connectivity properties, quantified using vertex, edge or spectral expansion. Expander constructions have spawned research in pure and applied mathematics, with several appli ...

s. * 2011: Elected as a member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

. * 2018: Elected as an ACM Fellow for "contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics". * 2019: The Knuth Prize for his contributions to "the foundations of computer science in areas including randomized computation, cryptography, circuit complexity, proof complexity, parallel computation, and our understanding of fundamental graph properties". * 2021: Shared the Abel Prize with László Lovász "for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics." * April 2024: The

, by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

, for "reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science."

References

External links

Avi Wigderson's home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wigderson, Avi 1956 births Living people 20th-century American scientists 20th-century Israeli engineers 21st-century American scientists 21st-century Israeli engineers Abel Prize laureates American people of Israeli descent 2018 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Gödel Prize laureates Knuth Prize laureates Academic staff of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute for Advanced Study faculty 20th-century Israeli mathematicians Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Nevanlinna Prize laureates Princeton University alumni Technion – Israel Institute of Technology alumni Israeli theoretical computer scientists Turing Award laureates