Eshan Chattopadhyay, associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, and David Zuckerman, professor of computer science at the University of Texas, have been awarded the 2025 Gdel Prize for their research paper, “Explicit Two-Source Extractors and Resilient Functions”. The paper showed how to turn two poor-quality random sources into one strong, reliable one—key for making secure, trustworthy computer systems.
The Godel Prize is a top honour in theoretical computer science, given each year, sometimes shared, by ACM SIGACT and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. Named after famous logician Kurt Gdel, it recognises one research paper for its exceptional and lasting contribution to the field.
WHAT IS RANDOMNESS EXTRACTION?
Imagine you’re flipping a weird coin that is not perfectly fair — sometimes it favours heads, sometimes tails. The result is still unpredictable, but not evenly so. Randomness extraction is the process of turning that weak, messy randomness into clean, strong, and fair random bits — like those from a perfect coin toss.
The technique generates truly random numbers using less computing power than previous approaches, potentially boosting security for everything from credit card payments to military communications.
WHO IS THE INDIAN-ORIGIN PROFESSOR?
Chattopadhyay completed his PhD at UT Austin before joining Cornell University, where he now works on pseudorandomness, circuit complexity, and communication complexity, according to the University of Texas.
In addition to the current honour, Chattopadhyay received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2023, a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2021 and an NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative award in 2019.
Chattopadhyay conducted postdoctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley.
He earned his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 and his BTech at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 2011, both in computer science, according to Cornell University.
The work was originally published in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) in 2016, where it received the Best Paper award, and later in the Annals of Mathematics in 2019, according to Cornell University.
With applications in complexity theory and cryptography, techniques introduced in the paper opened new approaches to long-standing problems in pseudo-randomness and explicit constructions.
Expressing his happiness, Chattopadhyay said, “This recognition is truly an incredible honour. The Gdel Prize has celebrated some of the most beautiful and foundational work in our field. It feels surreal and deeply gratifying that our paper is being placed in that category.”
