Night Science
Where do ideas come from? In each episode, scientists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher explore science's creative side with a leading colleague. New episodes come out every second Monday.
Night Science
18 | Shafi Goldwasser and the good joke
Shafi Goldwasser received the Turing Award – the “Nobel Prize of Computing” – in 2012. She needs no introduction to anyone working in computer science or cryptology, a field she essentially founded as a theoretical discipline. Shafi is a professor at both MIT and the Weizmann Institute in Israel, as well as being the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley. In this episode, Shafi tells us how her favourite scientific ideas are akin to a good joke: they catch you off guard with something unexpected. We discuss how even the most abstract work almost always starts from a concrete example, and how feeling comfortable expressing your ideas is the basis of good collaborations.
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