Gil Kalai was born in Tel Aviv and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  Kalai is the Henry and Manya Noskwith Professor of Mathematics at  the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Professor of Computer Science at IDC, Herzliya.  He is adjunct Professor of mathematics and computer science at Yale University.  

Kalai's main research areas are Combinatorics, Convexity and their applications.  Kalai  is known for his work on face numbers and diameter of polytopes, Helly-type theorems, and for finding  subexponential versions of the simplex algorithm. An influential 1988 paper by Kahn, Kalai and Linial on Boolean functions gave an early application of Fourier analysis in theoretical computer science, and subsequently  Kalai  has applied Fourier methods to the study of random graphs, percolation, noise, social choice, and other areas.  In 1993, Kalai and Kahn found a geometric object in 1325 dimensions that disproved the famous Borsuk Conjecture of 1933. Since 2005 he has studied noisy quantum computation.  Kalai's writes a blog "Combinatorics and More"  http://gilkalai.wordpress.com/

Kalai is the recipient of the 1992 Polya Prize, the 1993 Erdos Prize, the 1994 Fulkerson Prize, and the 2012 Rothschild Prize. He is a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality as well as the Center for Quantum Information Science at the Hebrew University. He is a member of the Israeli, European and Hungarian Academies of Science and was a plenary speaker in the 2016 European Congress of Mathematics and the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians.