Irit Dinur

With Kobbi Nissim, Dinur showed in 2003 that a database answering many statistical queries with too little noise leaks nearly everything. Given enough sums over random subsets, an attacker can solve for the individual rows, names removed or not. The result set a lower bound on how much noise is needed and became the starting point for differential privacy.

In complexity theory she is best known for a short, combinatorial proof of the PCP theorem in 2006, replacing a notoriously dense algebraic original. It earned her the 2019 Gödel Prize, two years after Dwork and colleagues won the same award for solving the problem Dinur had helped expose.