Scienceנפתלי תשבי

Naftali Tishby

Naftali Tishby was an Israeli computer scientist and computational neuroscientist and a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, known for the information bottleneck method.

1952 to 2021The information bottleneck methodComputational learning theoryComputational neuroscience at Hebrew University

Born: 28 December 1952, Jerusalem
Died: 9 August 2021
Occupation: computer scientist, neuroscientist
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University

Naftali Tishby was born in 1952 in Jerusalem

Naftali Tishby was born in Jerusalem in 1952. His father, Yeshaya Tishby, studied Kabbalah and Jewish thought. His mother, Esther, taught at the Hebrew University Secondary School, where he graduated in 1971.

He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University in 1974 and a master's degree at Tel Aviv University in 1980. He then completed a doctorate at the Hebrew University on an information theory approach to dynamical systems. He did postdoctoral work at MIT from 1985 to 1986.

After joining the academic Atuda program, he served in the IDF until 1980 and received the Israel Defense Prize that year.

From 1986 to 1991 he worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey on computational learning theory. In 1992 he joined the computer science faculty of the Hebrew University, where he helped found centers for neural computation, brain sciences and computational biology. He developed the information bottleneck method and received the Landau Prize in 2015.

He lived in Jerusalem, was married to psychology professor Oriya Tishby and had four children. He died on 9 August 2021 and donated his body to science.