David Zuckerman is an American theoretical computer scientist whose work concerns randomness in computation. He is a professor of computer science at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

Biography

Zuckerman received an A.B. in mathematics from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1987, where he was a Putnam Fellow in 1986. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

in 1991 advised by Umesh Vazirani. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

and

Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; he, הַאוּנִיבֶרְסִיטָה הַעִבְרִית בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם) is a public research university based in Jerusalem, Israel. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Dr. Chaim Weiz ...

before joining the University of Texas in 1994. Zuckerman was named a

Fellow of the ACM A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

in 2013, and a

Simons Investigator The Simons Foundation is a private foundation established in 1994 by Marilyn and Jim Simons with offices in New York City. As one of the largest charitable organizations in the US with assets of over $5 billion in 2022, the foundation's mission ...

in 2016.

Research

Most of Zuckerman's work concerns randomness in computation, and especially pseudorandomness. He has written over 80 papers on topics including

randomness extractor A randomness extractor, often simply called an "extractor", is a function, which being applied to output from a weakly random information entropy, entropy source, together with a short, uniformly random seed, generates a highly random output that ap ...

pseudorandom generators In theoretical computer science and cryptography, a pseudorandom generator (PRG) for a class of statistical tests is a deterministic procedure that maps a random seed to a longer pseudorandom string such that no statistical test in the class ca ...

, coding theory, and

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

. Zuckerman is best known for his work on randomness extractors. In 2015 Zuckerman and his student

Eshan Chattopadhyay Eshan may refer to: * Eshan Yi Autonomous County, Yuxi, Yunnan Province, China * Eshan Hilal, Indian belly dancer * Eshan Nayeck (died 1987), Mauritian convicted murderer See also * Eshani, a town and union council of Barkhan District, Balochistan ...

solved an important open problem in the area by giving the first explicit construction of two-source extractors. The resulting paper won a best-paper award at the 2016 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Zuckerman, David American computer scientists University of Texas at Austin faculty Theoretical computer scientists Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Living people Harvard College alumni Simons Investigator UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Putnam Fellows