On Friday, Jan. 30 at 11am, CSE Profs. Mohan Paturi and Russell Impagliazzo will host computer scientist and mathematician Avi Wigderson, one of the most prolific and influential researchers in the theory of computation. Wigderson was invited to speak in the department's colloquium and Distinguished Lecture Series. His topic: "Randomness". The talk is aimed at a general scientific audience. Wigderson is a professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, best known as the longtime intellectual home of Albert Einstein in the U.S. (from 1933 until his death in 1955), located in Princeton, NJ.
According to the abstract, "Is the universe inherently deterministic or probabilistic? Perhaps more importantly - can we tell the difference between the two? Humanity has pondered the meaning and utility of randomness for millennia. There is a remarkable variety of ways in which we utilize perfect coin tosses to our advantage: in statistics, cryptography, game theory, algorithms, gambling... Indeed, randomness seems indispensable! Which of these applications survive if the universe had no randomness in it at all? Which of them survive if only poor quality randomness is available, e.g. that arises from "unpredictable" phenomena like the weather or the stock market?"
Wigderson goes on to note that a "computational theory of randomness, developed in the past three decades, reveals (perhaps counter-intuitively) that very little is lost in such deterministic or weakly random worlds. In the talk I'll explain the main ideas and results of this theory."
Wigderson has made fundamental contributions to circuit complexity, parallel algorithms,cryptography (in particular, to zero-knowledge proofs and private multi-party computation), the role of randomness in computation, proof complexity, and connections between complexity and combinatorics. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton University in 1983, studying with Prof. Richard Lipton. He was a professor at Hebrew University from 1986 to 2003, and has been on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study since 2003. Among many other honors, Wigderson is the recipient of the Nevanlinna Prize (1994), awarded every four years for outstanding contributions in mathematical aspects of information sciences; and the Gödel Prize (2009), jointly with Omer Reingold and Salil Vadhan, for their work on the zig-zag graph product. In 2013 Wigderson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.