HISTORICAL FACTS

Women in the History of Computing Technology

"Let's not try to define knowledge, but try to define zero-knowledge"

Shafi Goldwasser

Shafi Goldwasser

Shafi Goldwasser 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. A world leader in cryptography and complexity theory, she is best known for her pioneering work on interactive and zero-knowledge proofs.

Shafrira Goldwasser was born in New York City in 1958. She obtains her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979 and her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1983, upon completion of her studies, she joins MIT, and in 1997 becomes the first holder of the RSA Professorship. The new chair is a result of a joint licensing agreement between MIT and RSA Data Security, Inc., an encryption company founded by Ronald L. Pivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. As an RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Shafi leads the cryptography and information security group at the Institute. She is also a member of the Theory of Computation group at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Goldwasser’s most significant achievement during her career, however, remains her extensive work on interactive and zero-knowledge proofs, which serve to allow secure transmission of information over the Internet. The system she designs makes it possible to demonstrate the validity of an assertion without conveying any additional knowledge (e.g., the possession of a valid credit card without giving out any particular information on it), and later becomes a fundamental tool in the design of cryptographic protocols.

Shafi’s other research interests include complexity theory and computational number theory. She makes important contributions to both fields and in particular to the classification of approximation problems, showing that there is a particular group of problems in number theory that remain hard even when only an approximate solution is needed.

Shafi Goldwasser

For her considerable accomplishments in the field of computing, Shafi Goldwasser receives the NSF presidential Young Investigator Award and the NSF Faculty Award for Women in 1991. In 1996, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recognizes her achievement by giving her the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for an outstanding young computer professional of the year.

Goldwasser also twice wins the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science: first in 1993 for her work “The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof Systems”, and again in 2001 for “Interactive Proofs and the Hardness of Approximating Cliques.” Her other honors include the RSA Award in Mathematics (1998) for significant contributions to cryptography, her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, to the National Academy of Science in 2004, and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005.

In 2009, Shafi Goldwasser is granted the Athena Lecturer Award of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Committee on Women in Computing. In 2010, she becomes the recipient of the Franklin Institute’s 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science.


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