Israeli computer scientist Avi Wigderson is awarded the prestigious AM Turing award.
Wigderson is hailed by the Association of Computing Machinery, the organization that oversees the prize, for “reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science.”
Wigderson “has been a leading figure in areas including computational complexity theory, algorithms and optimization, randomness and cryptography, parallel and distributed computation, combinatorics, and graph theory, as well as connections between theoretical computer science and mathematics and science,” the ACM noted.
The Turing Prize recipients receive a $1 million grant, funded by Google.
Haifa’s Technion also lauds Wigderson, an alumnus of the university.
After doing his undergrad at the Technion, Wigderson went on to do his MA and PhD at Princeton and is now a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
He has long maintained ties with the Technion and in June of 2023 was awarded an honorary doctorate there for “his significant contribution and leadership in the fields of computer science theory and discrete mathematics… and in gratitude for his long-standing relationship with the Technion, beginning with his undergraduate studies,” the Technion says.
Wigderson, born in Haifa in 1956, has had a prolific and varied career in the field of computer science, with hundreds of peer-reviewed articles to his credit and numerous other publications.
The Turing Award, also called “The Nobel Prize of Computing,” is named after Alan Turing, the British cryptographer and mathematician who famously cracked the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II.