The Gödel Prize Winner Who Just Made Your Data Way More Secure: Meet Eshan Chattopadhyay

Why a 30-year-old math problem solved by an Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) grad could revolutionize everything from your banking app to Bitcoin

If you've ever wondered whether your online banking is actually secure, or why your crypto wallet asks for "random seed phrases," congratulations—you've stumbled into one of computer science's most fundamental puzzles. And this week, that puzzle got a major piece solved by Eshan Chattopadhyay, an Indian-origin professor at Cornell who just won the 2025 Gödel Prize—think of it as the Nobel Prize for theoretical computer science.

But here's the kicker: Chattopadhyay's breakthrough isn't just academic glory. His work on "explicit two-source randomness extraction" solved a problem that had stumped computer scientists for nearly 30 years: how to generate high-quality randomness from two weak or unreliable sources. And in a world where your digital security depends on unpredictable numbers, that's a very big deal.

What Exactly Is the Gödel Prize? (And Why Should You Care?)

The Gödel Prize, named after the legendary mathematician Kurt Gödel, is awarded annually for outstanding papers in theoretical computer science. Previous winners have shaped everything from internet algorithms to quantum computing. Chattopadhyay shares the 2025 prize with his Ph.D. advisor, Professor David Zuckerman of the University of Texas at Austin, for their groundbreaking work on randomness extraction.

Think of it this way: if computer science were Hollywood, the Gödel Prize would be like winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay—except instead of entertaining millions, you're potentially securing the digital infrastructure that billions rely on daily.

The 30-Year Problem That Just Got Solved

Here's where things get interesting. The award-winning research, first presented in 2016 and published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2019, tackled how to generate high-quality randomness from two weak or unreliable sources. Their paper introduced something called a "two-source randomness extractor"—essentially a mathematical method that can take two imperfect, unpredictable sources and convert them into a single, strong, reliable stream of random bits.

Why does this matter? Because true randomness is the backbone of everything secure in the digital world. Every time you:

• Log into your banking app