Alexander Gamburd

Alexander Gamburd joined the faculty as Presidential Professor of mathematics in the fall of 2011. He specializes in spectral problems in number theory, probability, and combinatorics. His recent work concerns expander graphs, which are highly connected sparse graphs with wide-ranging applications in computer science and mathematics, and his research has resolved major conjectures in proving expansion for Cayley graphs by using recently developed tools from arithmetic combinatorics. This work has a number of applications, in particular in quantum computation, theory of quasi-crystals, and distribution of prime numbers in non-abelian groups. In 2008, he won a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on a beginning scientist or engineer. His research has been supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Gamburd, who came to the Graduate Center from the University of California–Santa Cruz, has given dozens of presentations at universities, institutes, and seminars and has published widely. He has received the Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, the von Neumann Early Career Fellowship at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and other fellowships from the NSF, the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. Gamburd holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University.