Avi Wigderson is a professor of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After studying Computer Science at Technion in Haifa, he obtained his PhD in 1983 from Princeton University. He held then various visiting positions including IBM Research at San Jose, MSRI Berkeley, and IAS Princeton. From 1986 to 2003 he was associate professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Wigderson has been for two decades a leading figure in the field of Mathematics of Computer Science, with fundamental contributions, in particular in Complexity Theory, Randomness, and Cryptography. He has been invited speaker at ICM in Tokyo (1990), and Zurich (1994), and plenary speaker in Madrid (2006). Among many awards he received both the Nevanlinna Prize (1994), and the Gödel Prize (2009).
This lecture about efficient computation, internet security, and the limits to human knowledge was hold on 7 May 2012 at ETH Zurich, when Avi Wigderson was invited as guest speaker of the Wolfgang Pauli Lectures. The Wolfgang Pauli Lectures are an annual lecture series that is devoted alternately to physics, mathematics and biology. They are named after the great theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli, who was professor at ETH Zurich from 1928 until his death in 1958.
