Alexander Lubotzky

Alexander Lubotzky was born in 1956 in Ramat Gan

Lubotzky was born in Ramat Gan in 1956 to parents who survived the Holocaust. His father, lawyer Iser Lubotzky, was a partisan, an Irgun officer and later legal adviser of the Herut movement. His mother, Rivka, survived the war in the forests of Poland and reached the country via Cyprus.

He began studying mathematics at Bar-Ilan University while still in high school and earned his BSc in 1975. He went on to doctoral studies under Hillel Furstenberg within the IDF academic reserve and completed his PhD in 1979.

In 1982 he joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he became a full professor in 1989 and later chaired the Einstein Institute of Mathematics. He edited the Israel Journal of Mathematics and led a research program at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2005 and 2006. In 2021 he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science.

In 1996 he helped found the Third Way party and was elected to the 14th Knesset. He worked on religion and state issues and co-wrote the 1998 Beilin-Lubotzky Covenant with Yossi Beilin and others. He left politics in 1999 and returned to academic work.

In 2002 he was appointed arbitrator between the Hebrew University and Amnon Shashua over Mobileye's intellectual property, and the sides settled in 2004 based on his proposal. He received the Israel Prize in 2018.