Micha A. Perles 90th Birthday Meeting

Last Monday we had an afternoon session of the Annual Meeting of the Israeli Mathematical Society celebrating Micha Perles’ 90th birthday. The speakers were Nati Linial, me, Noga Alon, Ron Adin, and Rom Pinchasi. There was a very nice attendance and quite a few former students of Micha came to the event. Some photos In the top row Micha with eleven former Ph. D. students and with five former women Ph. D. students. Below: lectures, greetings, and the audience. The lectures Nati Linial, Adventures with polytopes Abstract: To the best of my recollection, I first heard about polytopes only when I started to attend Micha’s seminar, but with time, I found myself studying them myself. Fondly remembering the many things that I learned from Micha, I will tell about my most recent foray into this realm. The bi-stochastic matrices form a polytope, in which every permutation matrix is clearly a vertex. The Birkhoff-von-Neumann theorem says that this exhausts the list of vertices. An array of…