Laszlo Babai

Contributed in a number of areas, most notably Computational Complexity, Group Theory, and Combinatorics. He won the Godel prize for introducing a novel notion of proofs: interactive proof systems, which he called Arthur-Merlin games, as well as holographic proofs. These notions led to some of the most exciting developments in Complexity Theory, revolutionizing Combinatorial Optimization by establishing the difficulty of finding near-optimal solutions. He was a pioneer of algorithmic group theory, developing techniques for numerous fundamental algorithmic problems on groups, most notably in the areas of graph isomorphism and matrix group membership.