Boaz Barak


Boaz Barak is an Israeli-American professor of computer science.
He graduated in 1999 with a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from Tel Aviv University He received in 2004 his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science with thesis Non-Black-Box Techniques in Cryptography under the supervision of Oded Goldreich. Barak was at the Institute for Advanced Study for two years from 2003 to 2005. In the computer science department of Princeton University he was an assistant professor from 2005 to 2010 and an associate professor from 2010 to 2011. From 2010 to 2016 he was a researcher at Microsoft's New England research laboratory. He is, since 2016, Harvard University's Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is a citizen of Israel and the U.S.A.
He co-authored, with Sanjeev Arora, Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach, published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. Barak also wrote, with David Steurer, extensive notes on the sum of squares algorithm and occasionally blogs on the Windows on Theory blog.
In 2014 Barak was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematics at Seoul. He was selected for Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers issue for 2014. With Mark Braverman, Xi Chen, and Anup Rao, he won the 2016 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize for the paper How to “Compress Interactive Communication”.

Patents