# Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Virginia Vassilevska Williams (née Virginia Panayotova Vassilevska)[1] is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research on graph algorithms and fast matrix multiplication. She is Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[2]

In 2011, Williams found an algorithm for multiplying two ${\displaystyle n\times n}$ matrices in time ${\displaystyle O(n^{2.373})}$. This improved a previous time bound that had stood as the best known for 24 years (independently of Andrew Stothers, who also improved the same bound a year earlier).[3][4][5]

## Education and career

Williams is originally from Bulgaria, and attended a German-language high school in Sofia.[6] She graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2003, and completed her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.[1] Her dissertation, Efficient Algorithms for Path Problems in Weighted Graphs, was supervised by Guy Blelloch.[7]

After postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study and University of California, Berkeley, Williams became an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University in 2013.[1] She moved to MIT as an associate professor in 2017.[2]

## Recognition

Williams was an NSF Computing Innovation Fellow for 2009–2011,[1] and won a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2017.[2] She was an invited speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians, speaking in the section on Mathematical Aspects of Computer Science.[8]

## Personal life

Virginia is married to Ryan Williams, also a computer scientist.