Oded Goldreich

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Oded Goldreich is a professor of computer science and incumbent of the Meyer W. Weisgal Professional Chair at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. His research interests lie within the theory of computation, specifically in developing the foundations of cryptography and investigating the interplay between randomness and computation.

As part of the research group on randomness and computation, Goldreich plans to study various notions of probabilistic proof systems that, in addition to shedding light on the nature of proofs, have many applications in cryptography and in the study of the intrinsic difficulty of certain important approximation problems. Another area of intended study during his fellowship year is pseudorandomness—that is, the study of objects that look random to any efficient procedure, though they are not truly random, and the implications of this study on the possibility of converting certain randomized procedures into deterministic ones.

Goldreich received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in computer science at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He is the author of the books Modern Cryptography, Probabilistic Proofs, and Pseudorandomness (Springer, 1999) and Foundations of Cryptography (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and is an editor of the Journal of Cryptology and SIAM Journal on Computing. He has been an invited speaker at various conferences, including the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians and the Crypto97 conference, and he is a corresponding fellow of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.