June 9, 2025
A 2016 research paper coauthored by Eshan Chattopadhyay, associate professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, has received the 2025 Gödel Prize, which recognizes outstanding papers in theoretical computer science.
Along with his former Ph.D. advisor, David Zuckerman, professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, Chattopadhyay penned “Explicit Two-Source Extractors and Resilient Functions.” The work was originally published in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) in 2016, where it received a Best Paper award, and later in the Annals of Mathematics in 2019. With applications in complexity theory and cryptography, techniques introduced in the paper opened new approaches to long-standing problems in pseudo-randomness and explicit constructions.
“David and I were fantastically optimistic when we started this work – we had no idea if our approach would actually succeed,” said Chattopadhyay, who is a member of Cornell’s Theory of Computing group. “It’s been amazing to watch the field move forward since then – what once felt like distant goals are now active areas of progress and discovery. I’m deeply grateful to see our work play a part in that progress, and honored that it’s received this kind of recognition.”
The ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computational Theory (ACM SIGACT) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) jointly award the annual Gödel Prize, which is named in honor of computational theorist Kurt Gödel. Chattopadhyay and Zuckerman will receive the award at STOC 2025, which will be held in Prague on June 23-27.
Chattopadhyay’s research is in theoretical computer science, with a particular focus on computational complexity theory, the role of randomness in computation, and cryptography. His past awards and honors include the National Academy of Sciences Held Prize (2024), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2023), and a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award (2021). Prior to joining Cornell in 2018, he completed postdoctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Berkeley. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016.