Samuel Friedland

Samuel Friedland

Professor,
University of Illinois at Chicago

Shmuel Friedland studied at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, graduating in 1967 with bachelor's degree and in 1971 with doctorate of science under the supervision of Benjamin Schwarz.[ As a postdoc Friedland was in 1972/73 at the Weizmann Institute, in 1973/74 at Stanford University, and in 1974/75 at the Institute for Advanced Study. Then he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he became in 1982 a full professor. In 1985 he became a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He was a visiting Professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison; IMA, Minneapolis; IHES, Bures-sur-Yvette; Technion, Haifa; and Berlin Mathematical school. He has contributed to the fields of one complex variable, matrix and operator theory, numerical linear algebra, combinatorics, ergodic theory and dynamical systems, mathematical physics, mathematical biology; algebraic geometry, quantum information theory; and Lie groups. He authored and coauthored 200+ papers, and four books. In 1978 he proved a conjecture of Erdos and Renyi related to the van der Waerden permanent conjecture. In 1982 he proved the Tverberg permanent conjecture. In 1993 he he shared the first Hans Schneider prize with M. Fiedler and I. Gohberg, awarded by the International Linear Algebra Society.
In 2012 together with his Ph.D. student Elizabeth Gross, he proved the set-theoretic version of the salmon conjecture posed by Elizabeth S. Allman.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (Class of 2019). Also, he was selected as a 2021 SIAM Fellow, "for deep and varied contributions to mathematics, especially linear algebra, matrix theory, and matrix computations".
Professor Friedland serves on the editorial board of Linear Algebra and Its Application, Linear and Multilinear Algebra, Special Matrices. He is the author "Matrices: Algebra, Analysis and Applications, World Scientific 2015.

Program Visits

Complexity and Linear Algebra, Fall 2025, Visiting Scientist