Scienceאירית דינור

Irit Dinur

Irit Dinur is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist known for her work on probabilistically checkable proofs and hardness of approximation.

born 1973A new proof of the PCP theoremHardness of approximation researchThe 2019 Gödel Prize

Born: 4 March 1973, Jerusalem
Occupation: mathematician, computer scientist
Education: Tel Aviv University

Irit Dinur was born in 1973 in Jerusalem

Irit Dinur was born in Jerusalem in 1973. She studied computer science and mathematics at Tel Aviv University. A course on computational complexity theory drew her to research because it joined math and philosophy.

She earned her doctorate at Tel Aviv University under Shmuel Safra. Her thesis showed that the vertex cover problem and the closest vector problem are hard to approximate. Her methods later inspired the Unique Games Conjecture.

After postdoctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study, NEC and the University of California, Berkeley, she became a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004. She joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2007 and became a full professor there in 2013. She published a new and simpler proof of the PCP theorem using expander graphs.

Her work on differential privacy was used in the 2020 U.S. census. In 2024 she became a permanent professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, the first woman in that role there.

Irit Dinur's life in 8 milestones

1973
Born in Jerusalem.
2003
Received the Nessyahu Prize in Mathematics.
2004
Became a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
2007
Joined the Weizmann Institute and received the Michael Bruno Memorial Award.
2010
Gave a plenary talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
2012
Won the Anna and Lajos Erdős Prize in Mathematics.
2019
Won the Gödel Prize for her paper on the PCP theorem.
2024
Became a permanent professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.