Alex
Lubotzky has made fundamental contributions in group theory and its
applications to geometry and number theory. His wide-ranging interests
include topics such as the congruence subgroup
problem, lattices in Lie groups and hyperbolic geometry, Kazhdan Property T,
subgroup growth, pro-finite groups, generation of finite simple groups. His
work with Sarnak and Phillips on the explicit construction of Ramanujan graphs
via modular forms and the problem of distributing points on the sphere attracted
a great deal of attention in computer science and engineering. Recently he
solved (jointly with M. Belolipetsky) the very old problem of realizing every finite group as the isometry
group of some n-dimensional compact hyperbolic manifold.
Lubotzky has been a Professor of Mathematics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem
since 1985 and has held visiting positions at Columbia, Yale, Stanford, and the
University of Chicago. He has published more than 80 papers and is the
recipient of the Erdos prize and the Rothschild prize. He twice received the
Ferran Sunyer L. Baloger prize for his research monographs "Discrete
Groups, Expanding Graphs, and Invariant Measures" and "Subgroup Growth"
(written with D. Segal). He was an invited speaker in the Zurich ICM in 1994, and
has given numerous distinguished lecture series at various universities (Yale,
Columbia, UCLA, Rice, and others) as well as many invited lectures at
international conferences.