Professor Shafrira Goldwasser

Shafrira (Shafi) Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and is also professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

Her first degree was in mathematics from CMU, and she then moved to Berkeley for graduate study. She joined MIT in 1983, becoming the first RSA Professor in 1997.

Her research areas include complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory. She is the co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs, which use interactive protocols to demonstrate with high probability the validity of an assertion, without conveying any other information than its validity; these are a key tool in the design of such things as anonymous electronic money. In complexity theory she applied interactive proofs to show that some problems in NP remain hard even when only an approximate solution is needed.

Shafi Goldwasser was the first person to be twice a co-winner of the Gödel Prize: first in 1993 for the original work on interactive proof systems, and again in 2001 for the work on hardness of approximation. She has also won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award and the RSA Award in Mathematics. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Science, and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.