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About Avner Magen
- Avner Magen (March 30, 1968 – May 29, 2010) was an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto whose research focused on the theory of metric embeddings, discrete geometry and computational geometry.
- He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and received his Ph.D.
- in Computer Science in 2002, under the supervision of Nati Linial.
- He held a postdoctoral fellowship at NEC Research in Princeton, New Jersey, from 2000 until 2002.
- He joined the University of Toronto in 2002, first as a postdoctoral fellow, and then as an assistant professor in 2004.
- He was promoted to associate professor in 2009.His major contributions include an algorithm for approximating the weight of the Euclidean minimum spanning tree in sublinear time, and finding a tight integrality gap for the vertex cover problem using the Frankl–Rödl graphs.
- He proved with his coauthors essentially that a huge class of semidefinite programming algorithms for the famous vertex cover problem will not achieve a solution of value less than the value of the optimal solution times a factor of two.
- With Nati Linial and Michael Saks, he showed how to embed trees into Euclidean metrics with low O(log log n) distortion.
- And in a later result, he showed how to do JL-style embeddings that preserved not only distances, but also higher order volumes.He died in a climbing accident in Alaska on May 29, 2010, leaving behind three children and a wife.
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