Vinod Vaikuntanathan
MIT cryptographer who helped move fully homomorphic encryption off exotic assumptions and onto ordinary lattice problems.
Craig Gentry's 2009 fully homomorphic scheme worked, but it leaned on ideal lattices and an awkward "squashing" step. In 2011 Vaikuntanathan and Zvika Brakerski showed the same result could be had straight from Learning With Errors, the problem Oded Regev posed in 2005. A year later came the BGV scheme with Gentry, which, together with its descendants, underpins libraries such as HElib and Microsoft SEAL.
He did his PhD at MIT under Shafi Goldwasser and is now a professor there. Brakerski, Gentry and Vaikuntanathan shared the 2022 Gödel Prize. He also co-founded Duality Technologies, which sells computation on encrypted data to banks — a market where patience is a prerequisite.