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Micha Perles

Micha Perles is an Israeli mathematician who works in geometry and combinatorics and is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

born 1936The Perles configurationThe Perles-Sauer-Shelah lemmaThe pumping lemma

Occupation: mathematician, university teacher
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Micha Perles was born in 1936 in Jerusalem

Micha Asher Perles was born in Jerusalem in 1936.

He studied at the Hebrew University, where he earned a master's degree under Michael Rabin. He completed his doctorate in mathematics there in 1964 under Branko Grünbaum, with a thesis on critical exponents of convex bodies.

He did postdoctoral work at the University of Washington and then taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1967 he became a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University, and he was made full professor in 1981. His research covers convexity, combinatorial geometry, combinatorics and graph theory.

With Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Eli Shamir he found a pumping lemma used to show that a language is not of a given type. He described the Perles configuration of nine points and is credited with a proof of the Perles-Sauer-Shelah lemma. He retired in 2005, and his students include Noga Alon, Gil Kalai and Nati Linial.