Assaf Naor (born May 7, 1975) is an Israeli American and Czech

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

, and a professor of mathematics at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

Academic career

Naor earned a baccalaureate from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996 and a doctorate from the same university in 2002, under the supervision of Joram Lindenstrauss.Curriculum vitae
retrieved 2019-06-15. He worked at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

from 2002 until 2007, with an affiliated faculty position at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

, and joined the NYU faculty in 2006.

Research

Naor's research concerns

metric space In mathematics, a metric space is a set together with a notion of '' distance'' between its elements, usually called points. The distance is measured by a function called a metric or distance function. Metric spaces are the most general sett ...

s, their properties, and related algorithms, including improved upper bounds on the Grothendieck inequality, applications of this inequality, and research on

metrical task system Task systems are mathematical objects used to model the set of possible configuration of online algorithms. They were introduced by Borodin, Linial and Saks (1992) to model a variety of online problems. A task system determines a set of states and ...

Awards and honors

Naor won the Bergmann award of the

United States – Israel Binational Science Foundation The United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) is a grant-awarding institution that promotes collaborative research in a wide range of basic and applied scientific disciplines, established in 1972 by an agreement between the governme ...

in 2007, and the Pazy award of the BSF in 2011. In 2012 he was one of four faculty winners of the Leonard Blavatnik Award of the

New York Academy of Sciences The New York Academy of Sciences (originally the Lyceum of Natural History) was founded in January 1817 as the Lyceum of Natural History. It is the fourth oldest scientific society in the United States. An independent, nonprofit organization wit ...

, given to young scientists and engineers in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. He won the

Salem Prize The Salem Prize, in memory of Raphael Salem, is awarded each year to young researchers for outstanding contributions to the field of analysis. It is awarded by the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and was fo ...

in 2008 for "contributions to the structural theory of metric spaces and its applications to computer science", and in the same year was given a

European Mathematical Society The European Mathematical Society (EMS) is a European organization dedicated to the development of mathematics in Europe. Its members are different mathematical societies in Europe, academic institutions and individual mathematicians. The current ...

Prize (one of ten awarded to outstanding younger mathematicians). He won the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 2011 "for introducing new invariants of metric spaces and for applying his new understanding of the distortion between various metric structures to theoretical computer science". In 2012 he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings ...

. He received the

Nemmers Prize in Mathematics The Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics is awarded biennially from Northwestern University. It was initially endowed along with a companion prize, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics, as part of a $14 million donation from the Nemme ...

in 2018 and in 2019 the Ostrowski Prize. He gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, on the topic of "Functional Analysis and Applications".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Naor, Assaf 1975 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians Czech mathematicians Israeli mathematicians Czech computer scientists Israeli computer scientists American computer scientists Theoretical computer scientists Einstein Institute of Mathematics alumni Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Functional analysts Princeton University faculty New York University faculty 21st-century American mathematicians