Steven Rudich

Steven Rudich (/ˈrʌdɪk/; October 4, 1961 – October 29, 2024) was an American computational theorist. He was a professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. In 1994, he and Alexander Razborov proved that a large class of combinatorial arguments, dubbed natural proofs, was unlikely to answer many of the important problems in computational complexity theory. For this work, they were awarded the Gödel Prize in 2007. He also co-authored a paper demonstrating that all currently known NP-complete problems remain NP-complete even under AC⁰ or NC⁰ reductions.

Amongst Carnegie Mellon students, he is best known as the teacher of the class "Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science" (formerly named "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist"), often considered one of the most difficult classes in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. He was a long-time editor of the Journal of Cryptology, as well as an accomplished magician. His Erdős number is 2.