Biography:Umesh Vazirani

Short description: Indian–American academic

Umesh Vazirani
Nationality	Indian–American
Alma mater	MIT, University of California, Berkeley
Known for	Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm
Awards	Fulkerson Prize (2012)
Scientific career
Fields	Quantum computation, Computational complexity
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	Randomness, Adversaries and Computation (1986)
Doctoral advisor	Manuel Blum
Doctoral students	Scott Aaronson Andris Ambainis Sanjeev Arora Urmila Mahadev Madhu Sudan David Zuckerman
Website	www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/

Umesh Virkumar Vazirani is an Indian–American academic who is the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center. His research interests lie primarily in quantum computing. He is also a co-author of a textbook on algorithms.

Biography

Vazirani received a BS from MIT in 1981 and received his Ph.D. in 1986 from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Manuel Blum.

He is the brother of University of California, Irvine professor Vijay Vazirani.

Research

Vazirani is one of the founders of the field of quantum computing. His 1993 paper with his student Ethan Bernstein on quantum complexity theory defined a model of quantum Turing machines which was amenable to complexity based analysis. This paper also gave an algorithm for the quantum Fourier transform, which was then used by Peter Shor within a year in his celebrated quantum algorithm for factoring integers.

With Charles Bennett, Ethan Bernstein, and Gilles Brassard, he showed that quantum computers cannot solve black-box search problems faster than [math]\displaystyle{ O(\sqrt{N}) }[/math] in the number of elements to be searched. This result shows that the Grover search algorithm is optimal. It also shows that quantum computers cannot solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time using only the certifier.

Awards and honors

In 2005, both Vazirani and his brother Vijay Vazirani were inducted as Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, Umesh for "contributions to theoretical computer science and quantum computation" and his brother Vijay for his work on approximation algorithms. Vazirani was 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 Sanjeev Arora). In 2018, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Selected publications

• Mulmuley, Ketan; Vazirani, Umesh V.; Vazirani, Vijay V. (1987), "Matching is as easy as matrix inversion", Combinatorica 7 (1): 105–113, doi:10.1007/BF02579206 . A preliminary version of this paper was also published in STOC '87.
• Bernstein, Ethan; Vazirani, Umesh (1993), "Quantum complexity theory", Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC '93), pp. 11–20, doi:10.1145/167088.167097, ISBN 978-0897915915 .
• Kearns, Michael J.; Vazirani, Umesh V. (1994), An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory, MIT Press, ISBN 9780262111935 .
• "Strengths and weaknesses of quantum computing", SIAM Journal on Computing 26 (5): 1510–1523, 1997, doi:10.1137/S0097539796300933, Bibcode: 1997quant.ph..1001B .

External links

• Umesh Vazirani at UC Berkeley