Avi Wigderson wins Turing Award!

I can’t find it now, but nearly 20 years ago, in the midst of an unusually stupid debate in the comment section of Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch’s blog, someone chimed in: “the argument about who’s the world’s most badass theoretical computer scientist is officially over. Wigderson owns you. You can all go home, punks.”

Avi Wigderson: central unifying figure of theoretical computer science for decades; consummate generalist who’s contributed to pretty much every corner of the field; advocate and cheerleader for the field; postdoc adviser to a large fraction of all theoretical computer scientists, including both me and my wife Dana; derandomizer of BPP (provided E requires exponential-size circuits). Now, Avi not only “owns you,” he also owns a well-deserved Turing Award (on top of his well-deserved Nevanlinna, Abel, Gödel, and Knuth prizes). As Avi’s health has been a matter of concern to those close to him ever since his cancer treatment, which he blogged about a few years ago, I’m sure today’s news will do much to lift his spirits.

I first met Avi a quarter-century ago, when I was 19, at a PCMI summer school on computational complexity at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Then I was lucky enough to visit Avi in Israel when he was still a professor at the Hebrew University (and I was a grad student at Berkeley)—first briefly, but then Avi invited me back to spend a whole semester in Jerusalem, which ended up being one of my most productive semesters ever. Then Avi, having by then moved to the IAS in Princeton, hosted me for a one-year postdoc there, and later he and I collaborated closely on the algebrization paper. He’s had a greater influence on my career than all but a tiny number of people, and I’m far from the only one who can say that.

Summarizing Avi’s scientific contributions could easily fill a book, but Quanta and New Scientist and Lance’s blog can all get you started if you’re interested. Eight years ago, I took a stab at explaining one tiny little slice of Avi’s impact—namely, his decades-long obsession with “why the permanent is so much harder than the determinant”—in my IAS lecture Avi Wigderson’s “Permanent” Impact On Me, to which I refer you now (I can’t produce a new such lecture on one day’s notice!).

Huge congratulations to Avi.