Professor Alexander Lubotzky of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been chosen to be the keynote speaker at the joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) that will take place in New Orleans in January 2011.
Lubotzky’s keynote address in front of the conference’s 6,000 attendees will mark the first time that an Israeli will be the keynote speaker at one of these conferences. He will be conducting three lectures, known as the Colloquium Lectures, on the topic of “Expander Graphs in Pure and Applied Mathematics.”
Professor Lubotzky was born in Tel Aviv and studied mathematics at Bar-Ilan University where he earned both his BA and PhD. He has served as head of the Mathematics department at the Hebrew University, and has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, with regular visits at Columbia and Yale.
He has published three books and more than 100 articles, and has won several awards, such as the Erdős Prize in 1990. In 2006, he got an honorary degree from the University of Chicago for his contribution to modern mathematics. He also served as a Member of Knesset for the Third Way Party between 1996 and 1999.
Lubotzky has managed to convince the organizers of the conference to break with tradition and move one of his lectures originally scheduled for a Saturday to Sunday, so that he would not have to lecture on Shabbat.
Lubotzky’s honor comes after it was announced in August that Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Elon Lindenstrauss won this year's highest global math honor, the 2010 Fields Medal which is considered the Nobel Prize of Mathematics. Lindenstrauss is the first Israeli to have been awarded the prize. He was awarded the prize for work using probabilistic and dynamic systems for solving problems in number theory.