On April 10, the Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing, was announced. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded the 2023 Turing Award to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli mathematician and professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. This recognition celebrates his foundational contributions to the field of computational theory, particularly his reshaping of our understanding of randomness in computation and his decades-long leadership in theoretical computer science. As part of the Turing Award, Wigderson will receive a prize of $1 million.
This is not Wigderson's first major award. In 2019, he received the prestigious Gödel Prize for his contributions to foundational areas of computer science such as randomized computation, cryptography, and parallel computation. In 2021, he was also awarded the Abel Prize, one of the "Big Three" prizes in the international mathematical community, alongside László Lovász, a professor at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.
Upon learning of his Turing Award, the 67-year-old Wigderson expressed his happiness in an interview with Nature, stating that he was "very happy" and had not expected to win. He believes he has already received enough love and appreciation and does not need further awards.
Wigderson was born in 1956 in Haifa, a port city in northern Israel. He studied at the Israel Institute of Technology and Princeton University, where he earned his doctoral degree in computer science under the guidance of the American mathematician Richard Lipton.
Wigderson is known for his research in computational complexity and randomness. He has taught at several universities in the United States and Israel and has been a full-time professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton since 2003.
In addition to his academic achievements, Wigderson is noted by the ACM for being "friendly, enthusiastic, and generous," fostering relationships with hundreds of researchers worldwide as mentors or collaborators. He has also authored a bestselling book on his discipline, which is freely available online.
"I think this field is great, and I'm happy to explain relevant issues to anyone," he said. For him, mathematics brings comfort and theoretical computer science is inseparable from mathematics because "we prove theorems just like mathematicians."
