Trevisan Award

The Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work is intended to promote and recognize high-impact work expositing ideas and results from the Theory of Computation. The exposition can have various target audiences, e.g. people in this field, people in adjacent or remote academic fields, as well as the general public. The form of exposition can vary, and can include books, surveys, lectures, course materials, video, audio (e.g. podcasts), blogs and other media products. The award may be given to a single piece of work or a series produced over time. The award may be given to an individual, or a small group who together produced this expository work.

The awardee will receive USD 2000 (to be divided among the awardees if multiple), as well as travel support if needed to attend STOC, where the award will be presented. STOC 2026 is June 22-26 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The endowment for this prize was initiated by a gift from Avi Wigderson, drawing on his Turing Award, and has been subsequently augmented by other individuals.

Nominations

By April 10, the nominator should submit the following to trevisan-exposition-award-2026@googlegroups.com.

A nomination letter of 1-3 pages describing why the work(s) and nominee(s) should be recognized with this award.
A copy of or link to the nominated work(s).
3-5 letters in support of the nomination.

It is suggested that the nomination provides evidence of the impact of the nominated work, for example by testimonials from those who have been exposed to the work or by relevant statistics.

The committee may roll over unsuccessful nominations for reconsideration in future years.

Eligibility

There are no eligibility constraints, except for disallowing nominations of those excluded under the ACM Awards conflict-of-interest policy, those currently on the Selection Committee (as listed below), the SIGACT Executive Committee, and those who have contributed financially to the award.

Selection Committee

Éva Tardos, Cornell University;
Salil Vadhan (chair), Harvard University;
Thomas Vidick, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne;
Avi Wigderson, Institute for Advanced Study

About Luca Trevisan

Luca Trevisan (1971-2024) was widely recognized in theoretical computer science (TCS) as one of the leaders of the field, with many major contributions to computational complexity, algorithms, cryptography, and the connections of TCS to pure mathematics. Luca held full professorships at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Bocconi University, and was the first Senior Scientist at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley from 2014-2019. He was an ACM Fellow and was the first computer scientist elected to the Italian National Academy of Science. Earlier in his career, Luca received the Oberwolfach Prize and a Sloan Research Fellowship, and was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians. He served on the Turing Award Selection Committee, the Scientific Board of the Institute for Pure and Applied Math, and the editorial boards of JACM, the ACM Transactions on Computation Theory, and the SIAM Journal on Computing. He was Program Chair for RANDOM 2001, RANDOM 2005, CCC 2005, FOCS 2010, and TAMC 2013.

Exposition of TCS was one of Luca’s lifelong passions, which he viewed as a way to make the field more inclusive, by reducing the barrier to entry. His surveys, lecture notes, blog posts, and talks are renowned for their clarity and insight. His blog, in theory, contained both scientific exposition and personal posts that were inspiring and motivational for many members of the community. Of particular impact was the Turing Centennial series of blog posts, which included essays from a number of gay and lesbian members of the scientific community (including Luca himself) who wrote about their experiences. Because of his impact on so many, Luca was invited to give the Inspirational Talk at the TCS4All workshop of 2024. Sadly, his cancer took his life the week before the workshop, but he had already heroically prepared the talk in his last months of life and arranged for others to give it on his behalf. Amazingly, he completed yet another expository survey during that time period, too.