Vijay Vazirani

Vijay Virkumar Vazirani (born 1957) is an Indian American theoretical computer scientist and distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He studied at IIT Delhi and then at MIT, earning his bachelor's degree in 1979, and received his doctorate at Berkeley in 1983 under Manuel Blum. He held posts at Cornell, IIT Delhi and Georgia Tech before moving to Irvine in 2017. His research covers algorithm design, computational complexity, cryptography and algorithmic game theory. In the 1980s he contributed to maximum matching, including the Micali-Vazirani algorithm, and proved the isolation lemma and, with Leslie Valiant, the Valiant-Vazirani theorem. He championed the primal-dual schema for approximation algorithms, wrote a widely used book on approximation algorithms in 2001, and has studied the computability of market equilibria. He was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2005 and received the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 2022.