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This is a
list of famous Jewish American Computer
Scientists. Shafrira Goldwasser
(Hebrew: שפרירה גולדווסר; born 1958) is the RSA Professor of
electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and a professor of
mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
Born in New York City, she obtained her B.S. (1979) in mathematics
from Carnegie Mellon University, and M.S. (1981) and Ph.D (1983) in
computer science from UC Berkeley. She joined MIT in 1983, and in 1997
became the first holder of the RSA Professorship. She is a member of
the Theory of Computation group at MIT Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory.
Goldwasser's research areas include complexity theory, cryptography
and computational number theory. She is the co-inventor of
zero-knowledge proofs, which probabilistically and interactively
demonstrate the validity of an assertion without conveying any
additional knowledge, and are a key tool in the design of
cryptographic protocols. Her work in complexity theory includes the
classification of approximation problems, showing that some problems
in NP remain hard even when only an approximate solution is needed.
For these groundbreaking results, Goldwasser has twice won the Gödel
Prize in theoretical 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").
Other awards include the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996) for
outstanding young computer professional of the year and the RSA Award
in Mathematics (1998) for outstanding mathematical contributions to
cryptography. In 2001 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, in 2004 she was elected to the National Academy of
Science, and in 2005 to the National Academy of Engineering. She was
selected as an IACR Fellow in 2007. |