Eli Shamir

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Eliahu (Eli) Shamir is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist, and the Jean and Helene Alfassa Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in 1963 under Shmuel Agmon. After brief positions at UC Berkeley and Northwestern, he returned to the Hebrew University in 1966 and became a full professor in 1972. Shamir helped found the university’s computer science program with Michael O. Rabin and, together with Rabin, discovered the pumping lemma for context-free languages. His research spans partial differential equations, automata theory, random graphs, computational learning theory, and computational linguistics, as well as areas in randomized and probabilistic algorithms, networks, and natural language processing. He has mentored many students, including Danny Dolev, Craig Gotsman, Joseph Naor, Marc Snir, Assaf Schuster, and Eli Upfal. He was awarded his named chair in 1987, and in 2002 a workshop on learning and formal verification was held in his honor at Neve Ilan, Israel.