Eliahu (Eli) Shamir () is an Israeli

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 ...

and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, the Jean and Helene Alfassa Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; ) is an Israeli public university, public research university based in Jerusalem. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in July 1918, the public university officially opened on 1 April 1925. ...

.Faculty profile
Hebrew University, retrieved 2012-03-12.

Biography

Shamir earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in 1963, under the supervision of Shmuel Agmon. After briefly holding faculty positions at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

and

Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...

, he returned to the Hebrew University in 1966 and was promoted to full professor in 1972.

Contributions

Shamir was one of the discoverers of the

pumping lemma for context-free languages In computer science, in particular in formal language theory, the pumping lemma for context-free languages, also known as the Bar-Hillel lemma, is a lemma that gives a property shared by all context-free languages and generalizes the pumping le ...

. He did research in

partial differential equation In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which involves a multivariable function and one or more of its partial derivatives. The function is often thought of as an "unknown" that solves the equation, similar to ho ...

automata theory Automata theory is the study of abstract machines and automata, as well as the computational problems that can be solved using them. It is a theory in theoretical computer science with close connections to cognitive science and mathematical l ...

random graph In mathematics, random graph is the general term to refer to probability distributions over graphs. Random graphs may be described simply by a probability distribution, or by a random process which generates them. The theory of random graphs l ...

computational learning theory In computer science, computational learning theory (or just learning theory) is a subfield of artificial intelligence devoted to studying the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms. Overview Theoretical results in machine learning m ...

, and

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

. He was (with

Michael O. Rabin Michael Oser Rabin (; born September 1, 1931) is an Israeli mathematician, computer scientist, and recipient of the Turing Award. Biography Early life and education Rabin was born in 1931 in Breslau, Germany (today Wrocław, in Poland), th ...

) one of the founders of the computer science program at the Hebrew University.

Awards and honors

He was given his named chair in 1987, and in 2002 a workshop on learning and formal verification was held in his honor at Neve Ilan, Israel.Workshop announcement
Stefan Leue, retrieved 2012-03-12.

Selected publications

*. *. *.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Shamir, Eliahu Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Israeli mathematicians Israeli theoretical computer scientists Graph theorists Einstein Institute of Mathematics alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty Northwestern University faculty Academic staff of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem