Steven Rudich

Who is Steven Rudich?

Steven Rudich is a professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. In 1994, he and Alexander Razborov proved that a large class of combinatorial arguments, dubbed natural proofs were unlikely to answer many of the important problems in computational complexity theory. For this work, they were awarded the Gödel prize in 2007. He also co-authored a paper demonstrating that all currently known NP-complete problems remain NP-complete even under AC⁰ or NC⁰ reductions.

Amongst Carnegie Mellon students, he is best known as the teacher of the class "Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science", often considered one of the most difficult classes in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. He is an editor of the Journal of Cryptology, as well as an accomplished magician. His Erdős number is 2.