Umesh Vazirani

Umesh Virkumar Vazirani (Hindi: उमेश वीरकुमार वज़ीरानी) 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 the author of a textbook on algorithms.

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 Georgia Tech College of Computing professor Vijay Vazirani.

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.

In 2005 both Vazirani and his brother 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).