The Turing Award, known as the "Nobel Prize" in the computer industry, was officially announced, and was awarded by Avi Wigderson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to complexity theory.
The Turing Award is the highest honor in the field of computer science, named after the British mathematician and logician Alan Turing, in recognition of Alan Turing's fundamental and pioneering contributions to the development of modern computer science.
Comparable to the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry and medicine, the Turing Award is considered one of the most prestigious awards in computer technology and academia, such as in 2018, the big three of deep learning, Bengio, Hinton and Lecun, jointly won the 2018 Turing Award for their pioneering work in the field of deep learning, and the three shared a $1 million prize.
This year's Turing Award was won by Avi Wigderson, a distinguished mathematician and computer scientist who is a leader in the fields of computational complexity theory, algorithms and optimization, randomness and cryptography, parallel and distributed computing, combinatorics, graph theory, and the correlation between theoretical computer science and mathematics and science.
A graduate of the University of Haifa, Wigson had planned to study mathematics from an early age, but his parents strongly recommended that he major in computer science, a decision that proved to be very far-sighted, as Wigson recalls. Wigson then went on to Princeton University, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on "Computational Complexity Research" under the supervision of Richard Lipton and earned a Ph.D. in computer science.
In the 80s of the last century, Wigson pioneered the concept of randomness into the study of computationally difficult problems, when in the field of computing, deterministic algorithms refer to those algorithms that always produce the same output when given the same input, and Wigson's probabilistic algorithm, or random algorithm, may produce different results, relying on random selection or random events each time it is executed.
Randomness seems to be everywhere, but in reality it is hard to find. In 1994, Wigson and computer scientist Noam Neeson delved into the connection between stochastic and deterministic algorithms, and discovered that deterministic algorithms could make use of so-called "pseudo-random" sequences that allowed the algorithm to produce consistent results every time it was executed.
Complexity theory is a branch of theoretical computer science and mathematics, which is committed to classifying computable problems according to their own complexity and linking these categories, such as a computable problem, which can be solved by a computer through a series of mechanical mathematical steps, which is commonly known as algorithms, the most famous problems in the field of complexity theory are P and NP problems, and Wigson mainly studies random algorithms.
Wigson's research has become a milestone in the field of computational complexity theory and randomization algorithm design, which not only promotes the development of theory, but also provides a new way for algorithm design and analysis in practical applications.
In 2021, the Abel Prize, the "Nobel Prize" in mathematics, was announced (the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics are also known as the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, and the age limit for the Philippine Prize), the Wigson Abel Prize, who has been fond of mathematics since childhood, has now become the only scholar who has won both the Abel Prize in mathematics and the Turing Award in computer science.
Wigson, currently a professor at the Herbert H. Maass School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was awarded the Nevanlina Prize in '94, the Gödel Prize in '09, and the Gartner Prize in '19, in addition to the Turing Award and the Abel Prize. He helped us better understand randomness and helped Google reap huge benefits, and Google paid tribute to Wigson's research results, and his great ideas and research directions will continue to inspire a new generation of researchers to continue their efforts!"