Avi Wigderson Receives Honorary Doctorate from Weizmann Institute of Science

On Monday, November 11, 2024, Avi Wigderson, Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics, was one of “eight shining examples of excellence” to be presented with an honorary doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science. 

Wigderson was recognized for “his pioneering contributions to mathematics and computer science, which have opened new horizons in both fields, and at the interface between them; his intellectual leadership in a wide range of scientific investigations for four decades, making him a true beacon of scholarly excellence; and his role as a mentor to generations of young researchers, including at the Weizmann Institute of Science.”

At IAS, Wigderson leads a program in Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics, which was formally established in 1999 with his appointment to the permanent Faculty. His main research area is computational complexity theory, which concerns itself with the power and limitations of algorithms, including the famous question “does P = NP?,” which asks whether every problem whose solution can be checked quickly by a computer can also be solved quickly by a computer. Historically, the same problem has been considered by Kurt Gödel, who first joined the Institute as a Member in the School of Mathematics in the academic year 1933–34 and remained at IAS until his death in 1978.

Wigderson has also been the recipient of many other notable honors. He is the only person to have received both the highest accolade in the field of computer science, the ACM A.M. Turing Award (2023), and the Abel Prize (2021), which is widely considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics.

Read the full citation for Wigderson’s honorary doctorate on the Weizmann Institute of Science website.