Gil Kalai

Gil Kalai, born in Tel Aviv in 1955, is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist who is Henry and Manya Noskwith Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with positions at Reichman University in Herzliya and at Yale. He took his doctorate at the Hebrew University in 1983 under Micha Perles. He is known for variants of the simplex algorithm that provably run in subexponential time, for showing that monotone graph properties have sharp phase transitions, for his work on Borsuk's problem and the Hirsch conjecture, and more broadly for polyhedral combinatorics. He is also a prominent skeptic of large-scale quantum computing and has set out his arguments as a series of conjectures. His honors include the Polya Prize, the Erdos Prize, the Fulkerson Prize, the Rothschild Prize and election as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.