Ely Merzbach

Ely Merzbach was born in 1950 in Paris

Ely Merzbach was born in Paris in 1950 and attended École Yabné there. He moved to Israel at 17 and studied for a year at Yeshivat Be'er Ya'akov. He then joined the IDF and served in the Nahal.

He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics in 1972 and a master's degree in mathematics in 1974 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his doctorate from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1979. With a Rothschild Fellowship, he did postdoctoral work in France at Pierre and Marie Curie University and the École Polytechnique.

He joined Bar-Ilan University in 1980 and became a full professor in 1993. His research covers point processes, measure theory and stochastic geometry. He headed the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, was elected dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences in 1997 and led the university's regional colleges from 2006 to 2011.

He was academic head of the college in Ariel and has served as student ombudsman at Ariel University since 2015. In 2017 he won the Lev Prize and published a book of word puzzles on the weekly Torah portions. In 2021 he became president of Michlalah-Jerusalem College, and in 2022 he received the Katz Award.