Elchanan Mossel ( he, אלחנן מוסל) is a professor of

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. His primary research fields are probability theory, combinatorics, and statistical inference.

Research

Mossel's research spans a number of topics across mathematics, statistics, economics, and computer science, including combinatorial statistics, discrete function inequalities, isoperimetry, game theory, social choice, computational complexity, and computational evolutionary biology. His work on discrete Fourier analysis and functions with low influence includes important contributions such as the proof of the " Majority is Stablest" conjecture, together with Ryan O’Donnell and Krzysztof Oleszkiewicz, and the proof of the optimality of the Goemans–Williamson MAX-CUT algorithm (assuming the

Unique Games Conjecture In computational complexity theory, the unique games conjecture (often referred to as UGC) is a conjecture made by Subhash Khot in 2002. The conjecture postulates that the problem of determining the approximate ''value'' of a certain type of gam ...

), with Subhash Khot, Guy Kindler and Ryan O’Donnell. Mossel has worked on the reconstruction problem on trees. He connected it to Steel's conjecture in Phylogenetic reconstruction, partially in work with

Constantinos Daskalakis Constantinos Daskalakis (; born 29 April 1981) is a Greek theoretical computer scientist. He is a professor at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labor ...

and Sébastien Roch. These result links the extremality of the Ising model on the

Bethe lattice In statistical mechanics and mathematics, the Bethe lattice (also called a regular tree) is an infinite connected cycle-free graph where all vertices have the same number of neighbors. The Bethe lattice was introduced into the physics literature ...

to a

phase transition In chemistry, thermodynamics, and other related fields, a phase transition (or phase change) is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states of ...

in the amount of data required for statistical inference on phylogenetic trees. With Joe Neeman and Allan Sly he established the role of the reconstruction problem on trees for the problem of detection in block models.

Education and career

Mossel graduated from the Open University of Israel in 1992 with a B.Sc. in mathematics. In 2000, he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the

Hebrew University The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; he, הַאוּנִיבֶרְסִיטָה הַעִבְרִית בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם) is a public research university based in Jerusalem, Israel. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Dr. Chaim Weiz ...

. Mossel held a postdoctoral position 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 ...

and was a Miller Research Fellow at

UC 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. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

before becoming a Professor at

, the

Weizmann Institute The Weizmann Institute of Science ( he, מכון ויצמן למדע ''Machon Vaitzman LeMada'') is a public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, 14 years before the State of Israel. It differs from other Israeli univ ...

, the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

and finally MIT. Mossel is a prolific scholar, with more than 100 coauthors and over 150 papers listed in MathSciNet as of 2022. He has advised 10 graduate students who have subsequently held faculty positions at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

Princeton 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 nine ...

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

, the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...

, the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

Recognition

* 2005 Sloan Fellow in Computer Science. * 2019 Simons Investigator Award in Mathematics. * 2019 Class of fellows 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, ...

"for contributions to probability, combinatorics, computing, and especially the interface between them". * 2020 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship of the U.S. Department of Defense. * 2021 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to theoretical computer science and inference". * 2022 Special Sectional Lecture at International Congress of Mathematics 2022 titled "Combinatorial Statistics and the Sciences" (in sections 12 = probability, 13 = combinatorics, 14 = mathematics of computer science and 18 = stochastic and differential modeling).

References

External links

Elchanan Mossel's Home Page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mossel, Elchanan Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Probability theorists Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Year of birth missing (living people) People from Jerusalem Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty