Rate My Professor Vijay Vazirani

Vijay V. Vazirani, a leading researcher in theoretical computer science, earned his S.B. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983. His doctoral thesis, "Maximum Matchings without Blossoms," was supervised by Manuel Blum. After his Ph.D., he held a postdoctoral position at Harvard University, working with Michael O. Rabin and Leslie Valiant. Vazirani's distinguished career spans several prestigious institutions: he joined Cornell University as faculty in 1984, became a full professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 1990, and served as a professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1995. In 2017, he moved to the University of California, Irvine, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO) Center.

Vazirani's research interests center on algorithmic problems in mathematical economics and game theory, design of efficient exact and approximation algorithms, and computational complexity theory. He authored the seminal textbook "Approximation Algorithms" (Springer-Verlag, 2001), which has become a standard reference. He also co-edited "Algorithmic Game Theory" (Cambridge University Press, 2007) with Noam Nisan, Tim Roughgarden, and Eva Tardos, and "Online and Matching-Based Market Design" (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Notable publications include "Planar Graph Perfect Matching is in NC" with Nima Anari (FOCS 2018; Journal of the ACM, 2020), "AdWords and Generalized Online Matching" (Journal of the ACM, 2007), "The Notion of a Rational Convex Program, and an Algorithm for the Arrow-Debreu Nash Bargaining Game" (Journal of the ACM, 2012), and recent papers such as "Cardinal-Utility Matching Markets: The Quest for Envy-Freeness, Pareto-Optimality, and Efficient Computability" with T. Trobst (Mathematics of Operations Research, 2026), "Nash-Bargaining-Based Models for Matching Markets: One-Sided and Two-Sided; Fisher and Arrow-Debreu" with M. Hosseini (ITCS, 2022), and "Convex Program Duality, Fisher Markets, and Nash Social Welfare" (ACM EC, 2017). His work has profoundly influenced the fields of optimization and algorithmic game theory. Vazirani has received the ACM Fellowship (2005), Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), and John von Neumann Theory Prize.