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Specifying the power and limitations of randomness

Drawn to computer science at the suggestion of his parents—who thought the field might provide a more practical outlet for his love of mathematics—Avi Wigderson, the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient, has made lasting contributions to the theory of computational complexity.

Wigderson’s voracious intellectual curiosity led him to explore topics ranging from cryptography and optimization to randomness, pseudorandomness, and circuit complexity. He is also a thoughtful leader and a generous mentor, and has worked to make the field more accessible to nonexperts with his recent book, Mathematics and Computation. That’s why Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff introduced the model of interactive proofs, along with the idea—which looks completely radical and ridiculous—that you can convince somebody of something without telling them anything they don’t know.

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