Moses Samson Charikar is an Indian-American computer scientist who works as a professor at Stanford University. He previously worked as a professor at Princeton University. His research focuses on approximation algorithms, streaming algorithms, and metric embeddings. He is known for developing the SimHash algorithm, which Google uses to find near duplicate items.

Charikar was born in Bombay, India, and represented India at the 1990 and 1991 International Mathematical Olympiads, earning bronze and silver medals. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. In 2000, he earned a doctorate from Stanford University, with guidance from Rajeev Motwani. He joined Princeton University's faculty in 2001.

In 2012, he received the Paris Kanellakis Award alongside Andrei Broder and Piotr Indyk for their work on locality-sensitive hashing.