Yuval Peres

Yuval Peres (; born 5 October 1963) is an Israeli mathematician best known for his research in probability theory, ergodic theory, mathematical analysis, theoretical computer science, and in particular for topics such as fractals and Hausdorff measure, random walks, Brownian motion, percolation and Markov chain mixing times. Peres was accused of sexual harassment by several female scientists.

Education and career Peres was born in Israel and obtained his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1990 under the supervision of Hillel Furstenberg. In 2006 Peres joined the Theory Group of Microsoft Research. By 2011 he was principal researcher at Microsoft Research and manager of the Microsoft Research Theory Group, an affiliate professor of mathematics at the University of Washington and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

He stopped being a group manager in 2012, and left Microsoft Research in 2018. He was a researcher at Kent State University from 2020 to 2022. He became a professor at the Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications in China in 2022.

Awards and recognition Peres was awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1995 and the Loève Prize in 2001. The work that led to the Loève Prize was surveyed in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society: "A key breakthrough was the observation that certain (hard to prove) intersection properties for Brownian motion and random walks are in fact equivalent to (easier to prove) survival properties of branching processes. This led ultimately to deep work on sample path properties of Brownian motion; for instance, on the fractal dimension of the frontier of two-dimensional Brownian motion and precise study of its thick and thin points and cover times." In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2016, he was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. In July 2017, he was a plenary lecturer at the Mathematical Congress of the Americas.

Allegations of sexual harassment Peres was accused of sexual harassment by several female scientists, including Dana Moshkovitz, Anima Anandkumar and Lisha Li. Moshkovitz said she was harassed by Peres on an informal job interview and she reported this to the Microsoft Theory Group. She also said that Peres was promoted shortly after her report.

In November 2018 three Israeli computer scientists Irit Dinur, Oded Goldreich and Ehud Friedgut wrote a letter to the community mentioning some allegations of sexual harassment against Peres and proposed a guideline of not making invitations to junior researchers that may be viewed as intimate.

Published works 2nd ed., 2017.