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Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award
The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more.
The Researcher Who Explores Computation by Conjuring New Worlds
Russell Impagliazzo studies hard problems, the limits of cryptography, the nature of randomness and more.
Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge
How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.
How Randomness Improves Algorithms
Unpredictability can help computer scientists solve otherwise intractable problems.
How Do Mathematicians Know Their Proofs Are Correct?
What makes a proof stronger than a guess? What does evidence look like in the realm of mathematical abstraction? Hear the mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood explain how probability helps to guide number theorists toward certainty.
The Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures Into Breakthroughs
Daniel Spielman solves important problems by thinking hard — about other questions.
Unimaginable Surfaces Discovered After Decades-Long Search
Using ideas borrowed from graph theory, two mathematicians have shown that extremely complex surfaces are easy to traverse.
Researchers Identify ‘Master Problem’ Underlying All Cryptography
The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity.
Mathematician Hurls Structure and Disorder Into Century-Old Problem
A new paper shows how to create longer disordered strings than mathematicians had thought possible, proving that a well-known recent conjecture is “spectacularly wrong.”