Prof. Sanjeev Arora

(CSE)

Prof. Sanjeev Arora is an Indian American theoretical computer scientist who is best known for his work on probabilistically checkable proofs and, in particular, the PCP theorem. He is currently the Charles C. Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, and his research interests include computational complexity theory, uses of randomness in computation, probabilistically checkable proofs, computing approximate solutions to NP-hard problems, geometric embeddings of metric spaces, and theoretical machine learning (especially deep learning).



Profile

Prof. Arora a B.S. in Mathematics with Computer Science from MIT in 1990 a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 under Umesh Vazirani. Earlier, in 1986, Prof.Arora had topped the IIT JEE but was transferred to MIT after 2 years at IIT Kanpur. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2002-03. He was awarded the Godel Prize for his work on the PCP theorem in 2001 and again in 2010 for the discovery (concurrently with Joseph S. B. Mitchell) of a polynomial time approximation scheme for the Euclidean travelling salesman problem. In 2008, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2011, he was awarded the ACM Infosys Foundation Award, given to mid-career researchers in Computer Science. Prof. Arora has been awarded the Fulkerson Prize for 2012 for his work on improving the approximation ratio for graph separators and related problems (jointly with Satish Rao and Umesh Vazirani). In 2012 he became a Simons Investigator. Prof. Arora was elected to the National Academy of Sciences on May 2, 2018.

Achievements and Honors


  • Plenary Speaker, International Congress of Mathematicians, 2018
  • Inducted as Member, National Academy of Science, 2018
  • Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2015.
  • Simons Investigator, 2012-continuing
  • AMS-MOS D.R. Fulkerson Prize, 2012.
  • ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences , 2011.
  • Best paper, IEEE Foundations of Computer Science, 2010.
  • EATCS-SIGACT Goedel Prize, 2010.
  • Elected ACM Fellow, 2008.
  • Engineering Council Teaching Award for Fall 2008, Princeton University.
  • Graduate Mentoring Award, Princeton University, 2005.
  • Best Paper, ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2004.
  • Semiplenary speaker, International Symposium on Math Programming, 2003.
  • Distinguished Alumnus Award, UC Berkeley Computer Science, 2003.
  • Invited speaker in Math Aspects of Computer Science session, International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), 2002.
  • EATCS-SIGACT Goedel Prize, 2001.
  • Plenary speaker, ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 1998.
  • David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship, 1997-2002.
  • Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, 1996.
  • NSF CAREER Award, 1995.
  • ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, (cowinner)1995.
  • IBM Graduate Fellowship, 1993.
  • Ranked first in India, IIT Joint Entrance Exam, 1986.