Avi Wigderson

Avi Wigderson was born in Haifa, Israel, the son of a nurse and an electrical engineer, both Holocaust survivors. Though he was interested in mathematics, his parents suggested computer science might be a more practical career path. Heeding their advice, he attended Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and received a bachelor’s degree in computer science before earning his PhD at Princeton University.

After finishing graduate school, Wigderson held several computer science positions in the United States before returning to Israel to join the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1999 he was appointed Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he is credited with launching a golden age of theoretical computer science. He has built his career around the study of computational complexity theory, which studies the speed and efficiency of algorithms, and is especially known for his work on the role of randomness.

Wigderson has won many awards throughout his career, including the Gödel Prize, Knuth Prize, and the Abel Prize (with László Lovász), for foundational contributions to theoretical computer science. In 2023 he won the prestigious Turing Award for his decades of intellectual leadership in the field. Computer science today “is extraordinarily rich,” Wigderson says. “I am surrounded by a community that surprises me and teaches me great things on a regular basis.”