Avi Wigderson ( he, אבי ויגדרזון; born 9 September 1956) is an Israeli mathematician and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

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

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

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nin ...

, New Jersey, United States of America. His research interests include complexity theory,

parallel algorithm In computer science, a parallel algorithm, as opposed to a traditional serial algorithm, is an algorithm which can do multiple operations in a given time. It has been a tradition of computer science to describe serial algorithms in abstract machin ...

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of '' graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conn ...

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

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

, and

neural network A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

s. Wigderson received the

Abel Prize The Abel Prize ( ; no, Abelprisen ) is awarded annually by the King of Norway to one or more outstanding mathematicians. It is named after the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829) and directly modeled after the Nobel Pri ...

in 2021 for his work in

theoretical computer science computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumscribe the ...

Biography

Avi Wigderson was born in

Haifa Haifa ( he, חֵיפָה ' ; ar, حَيْفَا ') is the 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 metropol ...

, Israel, to

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

survivors. Wigderson is a graduate of the

Hebrew Reali School , motto_translation = ''Walk Humbly'' , address = Hertzel 16 , city = Haifa , zipcode = 3312103 , country = Israel , coordinates = , other_name ...

in Haifa, and did his undergraduate studies at the Technion in

, Israel, graduating in 1980, and went on to graduate study at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

. He received his PhD in computer science in 1983 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Studies in

computational complexity In computer science, the computational complexity or simply complexity of an algorithm is the amount of resources required to run it. Particular focus is given to computation time (generally measured by the number of needed elementary operations) ...

", under the supervision of Richard Lipton. After short-term positions at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

, the

IBM Almaden Research Center IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research o ...

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popu ...

, and the

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute The Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath), formerly the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), is an independent nonprofit mathematical research institution on the University of California campus in Berkeley, Calif ...

in Berkeley, he joined the faculty of

Hebrew University The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; he, הַאוּנִיבֶרְסִיטָה הַעִבְרִית בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם) is a public university, public research university based in Jerusalem, Israel. Co-founded by Albert Einstein ...

in 1986. 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.

Awards and honors

Wigderson received the

Nevanlinna Prize The IMU Abacus Medal, known before 2022 as the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, is awarded once every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), for outstanding contributions in Mathemati ...

in 1994 for his work on

. Along with Omer Reingold and Salil Vadhan he won the 2009

Gödel Prize The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interes ...

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 applica ...

s. Wigderson was elected as a member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) 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, a ...

in 2011. He was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

in 2013. He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics". In 2019, Wigderson was awarded the Knuth Prize for his contributions to "the foundations of computer science in areas including randomized computation, cryptography, circuit complexity,

proof complexity In logic and theoretical computer science, and specifically proof theory and computational complexity theory, proof complexity is the field aiming to understand and analyse the computational resources that are required to prove or refute statements. ...

, parallel computation, and our understanding of fundamental graph properties". In 2021 Wigderson shared the

with

László Lovász László Lovász (; born March 9, 1948) is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He wa ...

"for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics."

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 engineers Abel Prize laureates American people of Israeli descent Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Gödel Prize laureates Knuth Prize laureates Hebrew University of Jerusalem faculty Institute for Advanced Study faculty Israeli computer scientists 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 Theoretical computer scientists