Saharon Shelah
Israeli mathematician
Saharon Shelah (Hebrew: שַׂהֲרֹן שֶׁלַח; Śahăron Šelaḥ, Hebrew pronunciation: [sähäʁo̞n ʃe̞läχ]; born July 3, 1945) is an Israeli mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Biography
Shelah was born in Jerusalem on July 3, 1945. He is the son of the Hebrew poet and Canaanist political activist Yonatan Ratosh. He attended Tichon Hadash high school in Tel Aviv. He received his PhD for his work on stable theories in 1969 from the Hebrew University.
Shelah is married to Yael, and has three children. His brother, magistrate judge Hamman Shelah was murdered along with his wife and daughter by an Egyptian soldier in the Ras Burqa massacre in 1985.
Shelah planned to be a scientist while at primary school, but initially was attracted to physics and biology, not mathematics. Later he found mathematical beauty in studying geometry: He said, "But when I reached the ninth grade I began studying geometry and my eyes opened to that beauty—a system of demonstration and theorems based on a very small number of axioms which impressed me and captivated me." At the age of 15, he decided to become a mathematician, a choice cemented after reading Abraham Halevy Fraenkel's book An Introduction to Mathematics.
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This entry incorporates text from “Saharon Shelah” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.