Zlil Sela

Zlil Sela is an Israeli mathematician working in the area of geometric group theory. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sela is known for the solution of the isomorphism problem for torsion-free word-hyperbolic groups and for the solution of the Tarski conjecture about equivalence of first order theories of finitely generated non-abelian free groups.

Sela received his Ph.D. in 1991 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where his doctoral advisor was Eliyahu Rips. Prior to his current appointment at the Hebrew University, he held an Associate Professor position at Columbia University in New York. While at Columbia, Sela won the Sloan Fellowship from the Sloan Foundation.

Sela gave an Invited Address at the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. He gave a plenary talk at the 2002 annual meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, and he delivered an AMS Invited Address at the October 2003 meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the 2005 Tarski Lectures () at the University of California at Berkeley. He was also awarded the 2003 Erdős Prize from the Israel Mathematical Union. Sela also received the 2008 Carol Karp Prize from the Association for Symbolic Logic for his work on the Tarski conjecture and on discovering and developing new connections between model theory and geometric group theory.