Avi Wigderson

Avi Wigderson is an Israeli-American mathematician and computer scientist renowned for his pioneering work in theoretical computer science, particularly in computational complexity theory and the interplay between randomness and computation. Born on September 9, 1956, in Haifa, Israel, to Holocaust survivor parents, he has reshaped foundational understandings of algorithms, cryptography, and probabilistic methods, earning him the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award—often called the "Nobel Prize of Computing"—for his transformative contributions to the role of randomness in computation and mathematics, as well as decades of leadership in the field.

Wigderson earned his B.Sc. in computer science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1980 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1983 under advisor Richard Lipton, with a thesis on combinatorial complexity. He joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1986, becoming a full professor in 1991, and in 1999 transitioned to the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he holds the Herbert H. Maass Professorship in the School of Mathematics. His research spans complexity theory, algorithms and optimization, randomness in computation, cryptography, quantum computation, and circuit complexity, with seminal results including pseudorandom generators that derandomize probabilistic algorithms, the zig-zag graph product for expander graphs (co-developed with Omer Reingold and Salil Vadhan), and co-invention of zero-knowledge proofs (with Oded Goldreich and Silvio Micali), which underpin modern blockchain technologies.

Avi Wigderson was born on September 9, 1956, in Haifa, Israel, to Jewish parents who were Holocaust survivors originally from Poland and had immigrated to the country in the early 1950s. His father, Pinchas Wigderson (1921–1988), worked as an electrical engineer, while his mother served as a part-time nurse; both had endured the loss of nearly their entire families during the Holocaust after escaping Nazi persecution.

Wigderson's early schooling began at a local primary school in Haifa before he transferred to the prestigious Hebrew Reali School, where he benefited from an inspiring mathematics teacher from Ukraine who encouraged deeper exploration of the subject. His initial exposure to mathematics came through extracurricular classes at school and solving Russian puzzle books with his father, whose enthusiasm for fundamental mathematical ideas further nurtured this interest. This foundation prepared him for his transition to higher education at the Technion in Haifa.

It was also at the Technion that Wigderson met his future wife, Edna Rothenstein, a mathematics student, in a problem-solving class during his final year in 1980; the two married shortly thereafter in the campus synagogue.