Micha Sharir

Micha Sharir was born in 1950 in Tel Aviv

Micha Sharir was born on 8 June 1950. His parents, Yaakov and Pnina, came to the Land of Israel from Czechoslovakia. In high school he took first place in the Weizmann Institute youth mathematics olympiad and won the Grossman Award from the Technion.

He finished his first degree in 1970 through the academic reserve program and then served in Unit 8200. In 1976 he earned a doctorate in pure mathematics at Tel Aviv University under Aldo Lazar. He then did postdoctoral work at New York University with Jack Schwartz.

At New York University he was deputy head of the Robotics Lab, and his work with Schwartz helped lay the basis for algorithmic motion planning in robotics. He joined Tel Aviv University in 1980 and became a full professor in 1985. He headed the computer science department twice, led the school of mathematics, and cofounded the Minerva Center for Geometry.

By 2018 he had published about 350 papers and supervised 27 doctoral students. His awards include the Landau Prize in 2002, the EMET Prize in 2007 and the Knuth Prize in 2025. In 2018 he was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences.