Avi Wigderson

Institute for Advanced Study

Avi Wigderson holds the Herbert H. Maass chair in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, where for four decades he has shaped computational complexity theory — the rigorous study of which problems are inherently hard and how much time, memory, and randomness their solution demands. A central theme of his oeuvre is the surprising power of randomness, and his celebrated derandomization results with Nisan and with Impagliazzo argued that, under plausible hardness assumptions, every efficient randomized procedure can be simulated deterministically — collapsing the gap between BPP and P. He helped formalize zero-knowledge proofs, expander graphs, the zig-zag product, and pseudorandomness, weaving threads between optimization, group theory, and combinatorics. The Norwegian Academy honored these advances with the Abel Prize in 2021, and the Association for Computing Machinery added its A.M. Turing Award in 2023, an exceptionally rare double crown spanning mathematics and computing; earlier laurels include the Nevanlinna Prize and the Gödel Prize. His investigations are foundational rather than commercial, yielding no patents or startups. For outreach he embodies the algorithms-and-complexity readership — laboratories and curricula built around provable guarantees, cryptographic primitives, and the mathematical bedrock beneath trustworthy, verifiable computation.