Avi Wigderson

Avi Wigderson (; born 9 September 1956 ) 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. His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, and distributed computing. He also received the 2023 Turing Award for his contributions to the understanding of randomness in the theory of computation.

Early life and studies Avi Wigderson was born in Haifa, 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 Haifa, graduating in 1980. In the Technion he met his wife Edna. He is credited with significantly expanding the field of computational complexity.

Wigderson investigated computational questions and specifically the role of randomness in the field. Together with Noam Nisan and Russell Impagliazzo, Wigderson 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.

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 graphs.

2011: Elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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 Turing Award, by the Association for Computing Machinery, for "reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science."