Elchanan Mossel

Elchanan Mossel (Hebrew: אלחנן מוסל) is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His primary research fields are probability theory, combinatorics, and statistical inference.

Elchanan Mossel
אלחנן מוסל
Born
Jerusalem, Israel
NationalityIsraeli
American
Alma materHebrew University
AwardsSloan Fellowship (2005)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics, computer science
InstitutionsMIT
UPenn
UC Berkeley
Weizmann Institute
Microsoft Research
Doctoral advisorYuval Peres
Doctoral studentsAllan Sly

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,[1] and the proof of the optimality of the Goemans–Williamson MAX-CUT algorithm,[2] 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 and Sébastien Roch. [3] [4] These result links the extremality of the Ising model on the Bethe lattice to a phase transition 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. [5] [6]


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. Mossel held a postdoctoral position at Microsoft Research and was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley before becoming a Professor at UC Berkeley, the Weizmann Institute, the University of Pennsylvania 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[7] who have subsequently held faculty positions at UCLA, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Caltech, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Texas, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Minnesota.

Recognition

He was included in the 2019 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to probability, combinatorics, computing, and especially the interface between them".[8] In 2020, he received the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship of the U.S. Department of Defense.[9] In 2021, he was named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to theoretical computer science and inference".[10]

References
  1. Noise stability of functions with low influences: Invariance and optimality, Annals of Mathematics, 2010, Volume 171, Issue 1, pp 295–341 http://annals.math.princeton.edu/2010/171-1/p05
  2. Optimal Inapproximability Results for MAX‐CUT and Other 2‐Variable CSPs? SIAM Journal on Computing, 2007, Volume 37, Issue 1, pp 319–357
  3. Phase transitions in phylogeny, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society , 2004, Volume 356, Vol 6, pp https://www.ams.org/journals/tran/2004-356-06/S0002-9947-03-03382-8/S0002-9947-03-03382-8.pdf
  4. Evolutionary trees and the Ising model on the Bethe lattice: a proof of Steel’s conjecture, Probability Theory and Related Fields, 2011, Volume 149, Issue 1–2, pp 149–189 doi:10.1007/s00440-009-0246-2
  5. Reconstruction and estimation in the planted partition model, Probability Theory and Related Fields, 2015, Volume 162, Issue 3, pp 431–461 doi:10.1007/s00440-014-0576-6
  6. A proof of the block model threshold conjecture, Combinatorica, 2018, Volume 38, Issue 3, pp 665-708 doi:10.1007/s00493-016-3238-8
  7. Elchanan Mossel - The Mathematics Genealogy Project https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=43809
  8. 2019 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2018-11-07
  9. 2020 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows, Department of Defense, retrieved 2022-04-11
  10. Elchanan Mossel ACM Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery, retrieved 2022-04-11
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