Avi Wigderson (Hebrew: אבי ויגדרזון; born 9 September 1956[1]) is an Israeli computer scientist and mathematician. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America.[2] His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, distributed computing, and neural networks.[3] Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science.[4] He also received the 2023 Turing Award for his contributions to the understanding of randomness in the theory of computation.[5][6]
Avi Wigderson | |
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אבי ויגדרזון | |
Born | Haifa, Israel | 9 September 1956
Education | Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Princeton University (Ph.D.) |
Known for | Zig-zag product |
Awards | Nevanlinna Prize (1994) Gödel Prize (2009) Knuth Prize (2019) Abel Prize (2021) Turing Award (2023) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Theoretical computer science |
Institutions | Institute for Advanced Study |
Thesis | Studies in Computational Complexity (1983) |
Doctoral advisor | Richard Lipton |
Doctoral students | Dorit Aharonov Ran Raz |
Avi Wigderson was born in Haifa, Israel, to Holocaust survivors.[7] Wigderson is a graduate of the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, and did his undergraduate studies at the Technion in Haifa, graduating in 1980. He went on to graduate study at Princeton University, 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.[8][9]
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 the 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]