Moshe Koppel

Moshe Koppel was born in 1956 in New York City

Koppel was born in 1956 in New York City to a family connected to the Ger Hasidic movement. He grew up there and received a traditional Jewish education.

He earned a B.A. at Yeshiva University and studied for a year at Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel. In 1979 he completed a doctorate in mathematics at New York University under Martin Davis. He then spent a postdoctoral year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

He moved to Israel in 1980 and joined the computer science department at Bar-Ilan University, retiring as professor emeritus in 2021. With colleagues he showed that word usage statistics can reveal an author's gender, age, native language and personality type. He also worked on social choice theory, chess programs trained on grandmaster games, and mathematical approaches to the Talmud.

He wrote two books on the Talmud, Meta-Halakhah and Seder Kinnim, co-founded the journal Higayon in 1989, and founded Dicta in 2015. He took part in efforts to draft a constitution for Israel and in 2012 founded the Kohelet Policy Forum, which he chairs. In 2019 he received the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism.