Biography
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 , and distributed computing . [ 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 was born in Haifa , Israel, to Holocaust survivors. [ 7 ] 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. [ 8 ] In the Technion he met his wife Edna. [ 8 ] 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 . [ 9 ] [ 10 ] He is credited with significantly expanding the field of computational complexity. [ 8 ] 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 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. [ 8 ] 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 ] Fields: Theoretical computer science Education: Israel Institute of Technology BS Princeton University MS PhD Award Citation: Nevanlinna Prize (1994) Gödel Prize (2009) Knuth Prize (2019) Abel Prize (2021) Turing Award (2023)
About the 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 computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
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Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)