Scienceאבי ויגדרזון

Avi Wigderson

Avi Wigderson is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, known for his work on computational complexity and randomness, for which he received the Abel Prize and the Turing Award.

born 1956Randomness in computationComputational complexity theoryThe zig-zag graph productZero-knowledge proofs

Born: 9 September 1956, Haifa
Occupation: mathematician, computer scientist, pedagogue, university teacher
Education: Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Hebrew Reali School

Avi Wigderson was born in 1956 in Haifa

Avi Wigderson was born in Haifa in 1956 to Holocaust survivors. He grew up in the city and graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa.

He studied computer science at the Technion from 1977 to 1980, where he met his wife Edna. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton University in 1983 under Richard Lipton. He then held short positions at UC Berkeley, the IBM research center in San Jose and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.

In 1986 he joined the Hebrew University, became a full professor in 1991 and headed its computer science institute from 1993 to 1995. In 1999 he took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, and in 2003 he left the Hebrew University to work there full time.

His research deals with the role of randomness in computation. With Noam Nisan and Russell Impagliazzo he showed that, under certain conditions, randomized algorithms can be replaced by nearly as fast ones without coin flipping. He developed the zig-zag product of graphs with Omer Reingold and Salil Vadhan, and worked on zero-knowledge proofs with Silvio Micali and Oded Goldreich.

He shared the 2021 Abel Prize with László Lovász and received the 2023 Turing Award. He and Edna have 3 children, and his son Yuval is a mathematics professor.