Noam Nisan | |
|---|---|
נעם ניסן | |
 Nisan in 2016 | |
| Born | (1961-06-20)June 20, 1961 (age 63) |
| Nationality | Israeli |
| Alma mater | Hebrew University of Jerusalem University of California, Berkeley |
| Awards | Gödel Prize (2012) Knuth Prize (2016) EATCS Award (2018) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Hebrew University of Jerusalem Microsoft Research |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard M. Karp |
| Doctoral students | Michal Parnas |
Noam Nisan (Hebrew:נעם ניסן; born June 20, 1961) is an Israelicomputer scientist, a professor of computer science at theHebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his research incomputational complexity theory andalgorithmic game theory.
Nisan did his undergraduate studies at the Hebrew University, graduating in 1984. He went to theUniversity of California, Berkeley, for graduate school, and received a Ph.D. in 1988 under the supervision ofRichard Karp. After postdoctoral studies at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology he joined the Hebrew University faculty in 1990.[1][2]
Nisan is the author ofUsing Hard Problems to Create Pseudorandom Generators (MIT Press, ACM Distinguished Dissertation Series, 1992), co-author with Eyal Kushilevitz of the bookCommunication Complexity (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and co-author with Shimon Schocken ofThe Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles (The MIT Press, 2005). In 2007 he co-edited the bookAlgorithmic Game Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
He has written highly cited papers onmechanism design,[3]combinatorial auctions,[4]thecomputational complexity ofpseudorandom number generators,[5] andinteractive proof systems,[6]among other topics.
Nisan won anACM Distinguished Dissertation Award for his Ph.D. thesis, onpseudorandom number generators.[7] He won theMichael Bruno Memorial Award in 2004.[8] In 2012 he won theGödel Prize, shared with five other recipients, for his work with Amir Ronen in which he coined the phrase "algorithmic mechanism design" and presented many applications of this type of problem within computer science.[9]
He won theKnuth Prize in 2016 "for fundamental and lasting contributions to theoretical computer science in areas including communication complexity, pseudorandom number generators, interactive proofs, and algorithmic game theory".[10]
In 2018 he won theRothschild Prize[11] and theEATCS Award for "his decisive influence on a range of areas in computational complexity theory and for algorithmic mechanism design, an elegant and rigorous computational theory that aptly informs economics".
