Shafi Goldwasser

Shafrira " Shafi " Goldwasser (Hebrew שפרירה גולדווסר; born 1958 in New York City ) is an American computer scientist.

In 1979, she earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, 1981 Master's and doctoral degrees in computer science in 1983 at UC Berkeley. In 1983 she came to MIT and the first holder of the new RSA Professor of electrical engineering and computer science in 1997. She is a member of the Theory of Computation Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She is also a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Goldwasser research on complexity theory, cryptography and algorithmic number theory. It developed in 1986 in collaboration with Joe Kilian according to the two authors, named based on elliptic curves prime detection. It is ( to 1982), the co-inventor of the zero-knowledge proofs ( and interactive proof systems in the same work with Charles Rackoff and Silvio Micali ), the probabilistically and interactively demonstrate the validity of an assertion without sending additional knowledge and a key tool in the design of cryptographic protocols are. Her other contributions in the field of cryptography include the co-development of the Blum - Goldwasser cryptosystem and the GMR signature scheme. Her work in complexity theory deal with the classification of approximation problems, where they showed that some NP -hard problems also remain difficult, if only an approximate solution is sought.

For their pioneering results Goldwasser of the Gödel Prize in Theoretical was twice awarded computer science: first in 1993 ( for "The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems" ), and again in 2001 ( for " Interactive Proofs and the Hardness of Approximating Cliques " ), their participation the PCP theorem. Other awards include the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the ACM as outstanding young computer expert of 1996 and the RSA Award in Mathematics (1998) for outstanding mathematical contributions to cryptography. In 2002 she gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing ( Mathematical foundations of modern cryptography: computational complexity perspective ) and in 1990 she was invited speaker at the ICM in Kyoto (Interactive proofs and applications ).

In 2001 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2004 to the National Academy of Sciences and in 2005 to the National Academy of Engineering. For 2012, the Turing Award has been awarded to her.