Three Interviews

My interview in the Israeli Academy interview series Interviewer: Alex Lubotzky At the beginning of the interview, I mentioned two lessons from my father. One was the formula for ((a+b)^2), which he showed me at a young age; the other was that everything becomes interesting if you devote yourself to it. (These two lessons were included in a short “promo” for the interview prepared by the Academy.) We spoke about my mathematical activities in high school, where Alex and I first met, and about my years as a research student of Micha A. Perles, alongside a remarkable group of fellow students. We also talked about my wife Mazi—the best choice of my life—and about our children, Neta, Hagai, and Lior, as well as life in Jerusalem and Boston in the 1980s. Mazi and I first met in 1979 on a student trip to Sinai, just a week before it was returned to Egypt. Most of the interview was devoted to mathematics: convex sets and polytopes, Helly-type theorems, high-dimensional trees, the Borsuk…