Sebastiano Vigna

Sebastiano Vigna (born 1967)^[1] is a professor of computer science at the University of Milan.^[2] He created the xorshift+ and xoroshiro128+ pseudorandom number generators. Xorshift128+ is used in the JavaScript engines of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.^[3][4] In 1991, he received a laurea in Mathematics and in 1996 a Ph.D. in computer science; both from the University of Milan. He developed UbiCrawler, a web crawler, in a collaboration with others.^[2][5]

He worked extensively on graph algorithms such as HyperBall.^[6] He used this algorithm, together with researchers from Facebook and others, to compute the degrees of separation on the global Facebook network, which resulted in an average distance of 4.74.^[7]