Shafi Goldwasser is a world leader in complexity theory, number theory, and cryptography and has produced groundbreaking work in these subjects. She is perhaps most well known for her work on interactive and zero-knowledge proofs (proofs in which no knowledge of the actual proof is transmitted).

Shafi Goldwasser was born in New York City in 1958. After early schooling in the local area Goldwasser studied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and she was awarded her B.S. in 1979. Goldwasser then moved to the University of California at Berkeley where she studied computer science. In 1981 she was awarded an M.S. degree and in 1983 she was awarded her Ph.D., both in computer science. Upon completion of her studies Goldwasser took up a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Goldwasser spent a brief period in the early 1990s at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. As...