The Speakers

Apostolos is a Professor at the National Technical University of Athens, specializing in convex geometric analysis, functional analysis, and probabilistic methods. He has made significant contributions to the study of extremal problems in convex bodies, random constructions in convex geometry, and many longstanding open questions, including the Busemann-Petty problem and Bourgain's slicing problem.

He earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Crete in 1993 with a dissertation titled Problems on Convex Bodies under the supervision of Souzana Papadopoulou. Apostolos is the author of several seminal books, including Geometry of Isotropic Convex Bodies (co-authored with Silouanos Brazitikos, Petros Valettas, and Beatrice-Helen Vritsiou) and Asymptotic Geometric Analysis, Parts I and II (co-authored with Shiri Artstein-Avidan and Vitali Milman). He has supervised 15 doctoral students.

Assaf is a Henry Burchard Fine Professor at Princeton University, specializing in Mathematics and Computer Science. His research focuses on metric spaces, their properties, and related algorithms. His work includes improved upper bounds for the Grothendieck inequality, applications of this inequality, and contributions to the study of metrical task systems.

Professor Naor earned his bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996 and his doctorate from the same institution in 2002 under the supervision of Joram Lindenstrauss. From 2002 to 2007, he worked at Microsoft Research while holding an affiliated faculty position at the University of Washington. He joined the faculty at New York University in 2006.

Assaf has received numerous prestigious awards for his contributions to mathematics. He won the Bergmann Award of the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) in 2007 and the Pazy Award of the BSF in 2011. In 2008, he was awarded both the Salem Prize for his "contributions to the structural theory of metric spaces and its applications to computer science" and a European Mathematical Society Prize. In 2011, he received the Bôcher Memorial Prize "for introducing new invariants of metric spaces and for applying his new understanding of the distortion between various metric structures to theoretical computer science." In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and was one of four faculty recipients of the Leonard Blavatnik Award from the New York Academy of Sciences. Assaf was also the recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics in 2018 and the Ostrowski Prize in 2019. He delivered an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010 on the topic of "Functional Analysis and Applications."