Irit Dinur is an Israeli mathematician. She is currently professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science

Weizmann Institute of Science

The Weizmann Institute of Science , known as Machon Weizmann, is a university and research institute in Rehovot, Israel. It differs from other Israeli universities in that it offers only graduate and post-graduate studies in the sciences....

. Her research is in foundations of computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 and in combinatorics

Combinatorics

Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics concerning the study of finite or countable discrete structures. Aspects of combinatorics include counting the structures of a given kind and size , deciding when certain criteria can be met, and constructing and analyzing objects meeting the criteria ,...

, especially probabilistically checkable proofs, hardness of approximation. She graduated from the school of computer science in Tel-Aviv University. Her advisor was Shmuel Safra

Shmuel Safra

Shmuel Safra is a Professor of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Born in Jerusalem.Safra's research areas include Complexity Theory and Automata Theory...

. She spent a couple of years in Princeton at Institute of Advanced Studies and NEC

NEC

, a Japanese multinational IT company, has its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC, part of the Sumitomo Group, provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and government....

, and a year as a Miller fellow at University of California Berkeley.

Irit Dinur contributed to the vertex cover

Vertex cover

In the mathematical discipline of graph theory, a vertex cover of a graph is a set of vertices such that each edge of the graph is incident to at least one vertex of the set....

 problem. In 2005, she discovered a dramatically simple and radically new proof of the PCP theorem

PCP theorem

In computational complexity theory, the PCP theorem states that every decision problem in the NP complexity class has probabilistically checkable proofs of constant query complexity and logarithmic randomness complexity .The PCP theorem says that for some universal constant K, for every...

.

External links

• Personal HomePage
• MathSciNet author profile
• On Dinur proof of the PCP theorem, by Jaikumar Radhakrishnan and Madhu Sudan, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 44 (2007) p. 19-61