Interview with Joel Spencer

Abstract

Photo by Mary Ann Spencer. Backdrop is Aurora in St. Petersburg. Joel Spencer completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1970 under the supervision of Andrew Gleason. During his career he worked at UCLA (1971-1972), MIT (1972-1975), and Stony Brook University (1975-1988). Since 1988 he has been a professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He has held visiting positions in Budapest (as a N.A.S. Exchange Fellow), the Weizmann Institute, Reading, MIT, the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, the Institute for Advanced Study, Melbourne, and at the Mittag-Leffler Institute. He is a Co-Founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of journal Random Structures and Algorithms (1990-2007) and also a member of the Editorial Board for the journals Combinatorica (1979-2009); American Math Monthly (1986-1991); Discrete Mathematics (1988-1996); The Annals of Applied Probability (1990-1994). He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematics in Zürich in 1994. In 2012 he was made a Fellow of the AMS and in 2017 became a SIAM Fellow. In 2021 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for mathematical exposition with his coauthor Noga Alon for their book The Probabilistic Method. His Erdős number is one.