Prof. Avi Wigderson has been the Herbert H. Maass Professor at the School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 1999, where he leads the institute’s Computer Science and Discrete Math program. His research interests include computational complexity theory, algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, and pseudo-randomness, as well as connections of the theory of computation to mathematics and the sciences. Prof. Wigderson received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1983 from Princeton University. During 1986-2001 he held a permanent position at the Hebrew University Computer Science Institute, where he was the chair from 1992-95. Wigderson has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, IBM Research, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Princeton University, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

His honors include being a two-time invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians, where he was also presented in 1994 with the Nevanlinna Prize for outstanding contributions in mathematical aspects of information sciences. He gave the AMS Gibbs Lectures and received the AMS Conant Prize for mathematical exposition in 2008. He was the recipient of the 2009 Gödel Prize, which recognizes outstanding papers in theoretical computer science. In 2011 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 with Hungarian mathematician László Lovász for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.