Gil Kalai - Biography#

Gil Kalai was born in 1955 in Tel Aviv. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem were he currently holds the Henry and Manya Noskwith Chair. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Yale University. He has held visiting positions at MIT, Cornell, IAS, KTH, Berkeley, Bell-labs, IBM and Microsoft. Kalai has written over 70 scientific papers and is the author of a scientific blog entitled "Combinatorics and More." He is the recipient of the 1992 Pólya Prize, the 1993 Erdös Prize, the 1994 Fulkerson Prize and the 2012 Rothschild Prize.

An influential 1988 paper by Kahn, Kalai and Linial on Boolean functions gave an early application of Fourier analysis in theoretical CS. Kalai, with various co-authors, has since applied Fourier analysis to the study of thresholds, influences, symmetries, noise, percolation and social choice. Kalai has also worked in the combinatorial study of convex sets and of convex polytopes and other cellular spaces. He studied face-numbers and other combinatorial invariants and developed a theory of algebraic shifting. He studied the diameter of polytopes and randomized simplex algorithms. In 1993, Kalai and Kahn found a geometric object in 1325 dimensions that disproved the famous Borsuk Conjecture of 1933.