Prof. Gordon’s personal website
Professor Emeritus Yehoram Gordon was born in Petah Tikva on July 2, 1940, and passed away on June 18, 2022.
When Yehoram was 12, his family moved to Cyprus, where his father managed a citrus farm. Yehoram studied there with private tutors and took the British matriculation exams. He then returned to Israel and studied at the Hebrew University. His MSc advisor was Branko Grunbaum and his PhD advisor was Joram Lindenstrauss. In 1967 he met his future wife, Avishag, in a shelter where they were hiding from the Jordanian bombardment during the Six-Day War.
After spending three years as a postdoc at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge he joined the Technion in 1974. He was promoted to full professor in 1987 and became a named professor of mathematics in 1993. His areas of research were functional analysis, geometry of convex bodies in high dimensions, probability, and approximation.
Yehoram published 66 papers, most of them in leading journals. When he was still a postdoc, he solved, together with Dan Lewis, a well-known open problem in functional analysis. The paper was published in Acta Mathematica, one of the top mathematical journals. They introduced the important notion, called later GL (Gordon-Lewis), which was used in many subsequent works in the field.
In another important paper, influenced by classical inequalities of Slepian, Fernique and Chevet, involving, under different assumptions, the distribution and expectation of the maximum of sums of gaussian random variables, Yehoram was able to obtain (with quite a complicated proof) similar inequalities related to the MinMax of a Gaussian matrix. These inequalities have many applications to random operators between finite-dimensional Banach spaces, and Yehoram gave short proofs of some deep and well-known theorems (such as Dvoretzky’s theorem on nearly spherical sections of convex bodies and the Johnson-Lindenstrauss dimension reduction lemma), as well as interesting new results.
Together with Moshe Zakai, Robert Adler and others, Yehoram was among the founders of the joint probability seminar of the EE, Math and IE departments. The seminar is still very active.
Yehoram was an invited speaker at numerous conferences and an invited long-term visitor at about 15 universities in Europe, US and Australia. In 1983 he received the Technion Mahler Prize for his research. He served on the editorial board of Positivity (a journal in mathematical analysis) since its inception in 1996. He advised 5 MSc and PhD students.
Yehoram is survived by his wife, Avishag, his children, Itai and Karni, and four grandchildren.
May he rest in peace.
