university professor computer scientist
He received a Bachelor of Surgery in Mathematics with Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990 and received a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 under Umesh Vazirani.
He is currently the Charles C. Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, and his research interests include computational complexity theory, uses of randomness in computation, probabilistically checkable proofs, computing approximate solutions to Natural Philosophy-hard problems, and geometric embeddings of metric spaces. Earlier, in 1986, Sanjeev Arora had topped the prestigious IIT JEE but transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology after 2 years at IIT Kanpur. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2002-2003.
He was awarded the Gödel Prize for his work on the Pickersgill Consultancy and Planning theorem in 2001 and again in 2010 for the discovery (concurrently with Joseph South B Mitchell) of a polynomial time approximation scheme for the euclidean travelling salesman problem.
In 2008 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2011 he was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Infosys Foundation Award, given to mid-career researchers in Computer Science.
He and his coauthors have argued that certain financial products are associated with computational asymmetry which under certain conditions may lead to market instability.
His Doctor of Philosophy thesis on probabilistically checkable proofs received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1995. Arora has been awarded the Fulkerson Prize for 2012 for his work on improving the approximation ratio for graph separators and related problems (jointly with Satish Rao and Umesh Vazirani). He is a coauthor (with Boaz Barak) of the book Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach and is a founder, and on the Executive Board, of Princeton"s Center for Computational Intractability.
