Avi Wigderson

Avi Wigderson (Hebrew: אבי ויגדרזון‎; born 9 September 1956[1]) is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.[2] His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, distributed computing, and neural networks.[3]

Avi Wigderson
Born (1956-09-09) 9 September 1956
Israel
Alma materTechnion
Princeton University (Ph.D.)
AwardsNevanlinna Prize (1994)
Gödel Prize (2009)
Knuth Prize (2019)
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical computer science
InstitutionsInstitute for Advanced Study
ThesisStudies in Computational Complexity (1983)
Doctoral advisorRichard Lipton
Doctoral studentsDorit Aharonov
Ran Raz

Biography

Wigderson did his undergraduate studies at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, graduating in 1980, and went on to graduate study at Princeton University. 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.[4][5] After short-term positions at the University of California, Berkeley, the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, he joined the faculty of Hebrew University 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.[3]

Awards and honors

Wigderson received the Nevanlinna Prize in 1994 for his work on computational complexity.[6] Along with Omer Reingold and Salil Vadhan he won the 2009 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 graphs.[7] He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.[8] He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics".[9] 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, parallel computation, and our understanding of fundamental graph properties".[10]

References
  1. Wigderson, Avi (May 22, 2014), Resumé (PDF), retrieved March 7, 2016
  2. "Faculty | IAS School of Mathematics". www.math.ias.edu. Retrieved 2020-06-19.
  3. Short biography Archived June 12, 2010, at the Wayback Machine from Wigderson's web site, retrieved 2010-05-03.
  4. Wigderson, Avi (1983). Studies in computational complexity.
  5. Avi Wigderson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  6. "HU Professor Wins 'Nobel Prize' Of Computers", The Jerusalem Post, Aug 3, 1994
  7. Avi Wigderson and Colleagues Honored with 2009 Gödel Prize, Institute for Advanced Study, retrieved 2010-05-03
  8. National Academy of Sciences Members and Foreign Associates Elected, National Academy of Sciences, April 30, 2013.
  9. 2018 ACM Fellows Honored for Pivotal Achievements that Underpin the Digital Age, Association for Computing Machinery, December 5, 2018
  10. 2019 Knuth prize is Awarded to Avi Wigderson (PDF), ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory, March 23, 2019
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