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Shmuel Gal

Shmuel Gal is an Israeli mathematician and statistician, a professor emeritus of statistics at the University of Haifa known for his work on search games.

born 1940Gal's accurate tables methodSolving the princess and monster gameSearch games and rendezvous problemsA sorting algorithm used by IBM

Occupation: mathematician
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Shmuel Gal was born in 1940

Shmuel Gal was born in 1940. He studied mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed his master's degree there in 1962, with work on stochastic approximations under H. Kesten. In 1972 he earned his doctorate there, with a thesis on minimax solutions to search problems under Aryeh Dvoretzky.

From 1965 to 1973 he worked as a senior mathematician at Israel Aerospace Industries. He also taught statistics at Tel Aviv University from 1970 to 1973 and at the University of Haifa from 1973 to 1975. He was a visiting researcher at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights in 1977 and 1978, and did research at IBM Israel from 1973 to 1997.

He taught at the Technion from 1981 to 1990. In 1994 he became a professor of statistics at the University of Haifa, and he headed its statistics department from 1995 to 1998.

Gal devised the accurate tables method for computing elementary functions. In 1993 he and Zvi Yehudai developed a sorting algorithm used by IBM. He solved the princess and monster game, contributed to search games, and worked on rendezvous problems with Steve Alpern, Vic Baston and John Howard.