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Biography
Itai Benjamini is an Israeli mathematician who holds the Renee and Jay Weiss Chair in the Department of Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Benjamini completed his Ph.D. in 1992 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Benjamin Weiss, with a dissertation concerning random walks.
With Olle Häggström, Benjamini edited the selected works of Oded Schramm.[S] He has also made contributions to topics including the Biham–Middleton–Levine traffic model for simulating traffic flow by cellular automata,[AB] isoperimetric inequalities and curve-shortening flow on Riemannian manifolds,[BC] and the use of the circle packing theorem to analyze random walks on infinite limits of bounded-degree finite planar graphs.[BS]
In 2004 he won the Rollo Davidson Prize for young probability theorists "for his work across probability, including the analytic and geometric, particularly in the study of random processes associated with graphs". In the same year he also won the Morris L. Levinson Prize of the Weizmann Institute. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, speaking about "random planar metrics".[B]