Irit Dinur

Irit Dinur is an Israeli mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for her work on probabilistically checkable proofs and hardness of approximation. She is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has held positions at institutions including Microsoft Research. Dinur's contributions have influenced research in computational complexity, combinatorics, and algorithmic hardness.

Early life and education

Dinur was born in Israel and raised in an environment connected to Israeli academic institutions and research centers. She studied at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and completed graduate studies supervised by Noam Nisan at Tel Aviv University, earning a doctorate in theoretical computer science. Her doctoral work and early training connected her with researchers across institutes such as Weizmann Institute of Science and collaborative networks including groups affiliated with Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.

Academic career

Dinur joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she taught courses and supervised students in theoretical computer science and mathematics. She has held visiting positions and collaborations with research labs including Microsoft Research and academic departments at University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, and Columbia University. Dinur served on program committees for conferences such as the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing and the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science and has been involved with editorial boards of journals like the Journal of the ACM and SIAM Journal on Computing.

Research and contributions

Dinur is best known for a new proof of the PCP theorem that provided an alternative route to results on hardness of approximation and complexity. Her work provided combinatorial simplifications and techniques that influenced studies of PCP constructions, expansion properties related to expander graphs, and reduction methods used in proving inapproximability results such as those related to the Traveling Salesman Problem, Set Cover, and Vertex Cover. Dinur's methods connected to concepts from probability theory and structural combinatorics studied at institutions like Institute for Advanced Study and employed tools similar to those used by researchers at Rutgers University and University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

Her contributions include developments in gap amplification, robustness of proof systems, and analyses that impacted lines of research stemming from initial PCP results by groups at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University as well as foundational work by scholars affiliated with Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Carnegie Mellon University. Dinur's research has been cited in subsequent studies on approximation hardness, coding theory connections explored at California Institute of Technology, and probabilistic constructions investigated at Princeton University.

Awards and honors

Dinur's achievements have been recognized with major awards in theoretical computer science, including the Gödel Prize and the Knuth Prize. She has received fellowships and honors from national and international bodies, and has been invited to deliver talks at venues such as the International Congress of Mathematicians, the European Symposium on Algorithms, and workshops hosted by Simons Foundation and Institute for Advanced Study. Dinur's work has been acknowledged by prize committees and societies including the Association for Computing Machinery and European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

Selected publications

- Dinur, I. "The PCP theorem by gap amplification." Journal of the ACM. - Dinur, I., and Reingold, O. "Composition techniques for probabilistically checkable proofs." Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. - Dinur, I., Harsha, P., Kindler, G., and Safra, S. "Hardness of approximation via PCP constructions." SIAM Journal on Computing. - Dinur, I., and Steurer, D. "Analytical approaches to expansion and inapproximability." Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

Category:Israeli mathematicians Category:Theoretical computer scientists