Eli Shamir

Eliahu (Eli) Shamir (Hebrew: אליהו שמיר) is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist, the Jean and Helene Alfassa Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.^[1]

Eliahu (Eli) Shamir
אליהו שמיר
Alma mater	Hebrew University
Known for	pumping lemma
Scientific career
Fields	Randomized and probabilistic algorithms, Communication networks, Natural language processing
Thesis	Hilbert Transforms On a Half Line and Mixed Elliptic Boundary Problems in the Plane  (1963)
Doctoral students	Danny Dolev Craig Gotsman Joseph Naor Marc Snir Assaf Schuster Eli Upfal

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 and Northwestern University, he returned to the Hebrew University in 1966 and was promoted to full professor in 1972.^[1][2]

Contributions

Shamir was one of the discoverers of the pumping lemma for context-free languages.^[3] He did research in partial differential equations, automata theory, random graphs, computational learning theory, and computational linguistics. He was (with Michael O. Rabin) one of the founders of the computer science program at the Hebrew University.^[4]

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.^[4]

Selected publications

• Bar-Hillel, Y.; Perles, M.; Shamir, E. (1961), "On formal properties of simple phrase structure grammars", Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung, 14 (2): 143–172.
• Shamir, E.; Spencer, J. (1987), "Sharp concentration of the chromatic number on random graphs G_n,p", Combinatorica, 7 (1): 121–129, doi:10.1007/BF02579208, MR 0905159, S2CID 27769008.
• Freund, Yoav; Seung, H. Sebastian; Shamir, Eli; Tishby, Naftali (1997), "Selective sampling using the query by committee algorithm", Machine Learning, 28 (2–3): 133–168, doi:10.1023/A:1007330508534.