Oded Goldreich

Oded Goldreich (born February 4, 1957) is an Israeli theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he holds the Meyer W. Weisgal Professorial Chair. His research centers on the interplay between randomness and computation, with foundational contributions to pseudorandomness, zero-knowledge proofs, property testing, and the theoretical underpinnings of cryptography and computational complexity. Goldreich received the 2017 Knuth Prize from ACM SIGACT and IEEE TC for his lasting impact on theoretical computer science, particularly in pseudorandomness and probabilistic proof systems. In 2021, he was awarded the Israel Prize in mathematics and computer science, the nation's highest academic honor in the field, though the selection process drew political controversy due to his left-leaning public stances and affiliations. He has authored influential texts such as Foundations of Cryptography and Modern Cryptography, Probabilistic Proofs and Pseudorandomness, emphasizing rigorous, complexity-based foundations over heuristic approaches.

Oded Goldreich was born on February 4, 1957, in Tel Aviv, Israel. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Europe who had escaped Nazi persecution: his mother, born in 1912 in Hannover, Germany, immigrated to Palestine with her family shortly after the Nazis seized power in 1933; his father, born in 1906 in Vienna (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy), earned an engineering degree in the mid-1930s before relocating. Growing up in Tel Aviv, Goldreich developed an early interest in civil engineering, influenced by his father's profession.