Lior Gishboliner
Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics
Lior Gishboliner is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics whose research interests lie in external and probabilistic combinatorics, which is a very active area of discrete mathematics. Extremal combinatorics deal with problems of maximizing or minimizing a given combinatorial parameter under given constraints. Such problems often have connections to other areas of mathematics, such as number theory, geometry, harmonic analysis and group theory. Probabilistic combinatorics deals with the application of probabilistic reasoning to combinatorial problems and with the study of random discrete structures.
Gishboliner is also interested in the application of combinatorial techniques in theoretical computer science. One example of this is the area of property testing, which is the subject of several of his recent publications. Property testing deals with designing ultra-fast "election polling" random algorithms for deciding if an object has a certain property or is far from having it. While it is known that such testers exist in a variety of settings, these existence proofs provide only astronomical bounds on the sample size of the testers, making these testers inefficient, and it is an important open problem to determine in which cases efficient testers exist. Two of Gishboliner’s recent publications resolved instances of this general question, settling two 15-year-old open problems. The general question continues to preoccupy him.
After earning his PhD from Tel Aviv University in 2021, Gishboliner was a postdoctoral research fellow at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.