Saharon Shelah (; born July 3, 1945) is an Israeli mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University in New Jersey. Biography Shelah was born in Jerusalem on July 3, 1945. He is the son of the Israeli poet and political activist Yonatan Ratosh. He received his PhD for his work on stable theories in 1969 from the Hebrew University. Shelah is married to Yael, and has three children. His brother, magistrate judge Hamman Shelah was murdered along with his wife and daughter by an Egyptian soldier in the Ras Burqa massacre in 1985. Shelah planned to be a scientist while at primary school, but initially was attracted to physics and biology, not mathematics. Later he found mathematical beauty in studying geometry: He said, "But when I reached the ninth grade I began studying geometry and my eyes opened to that beauty—a system of demonstration and theorems based on a very small number of axioms which impressed me and captivated me." At the age of 15, he decided to become a mathematician, a choice cemented after reading Abraham Halevy Fraenkel's book An Introduction to Mathematics. He received a B.Sc. from Tel Aviv University in 1964, served in the Israel Defense Forces Army between 1964 and 1967, and obtained a M.Sc. from the Hebrew University (under the direction of Haim Gaifman) in 1967. He then worked as a teaching assistant at the Institute of Mathematics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while completing a Ph.D. there under the supervision of Michael Oser Rabin, on a study of stable theories. Shelah was a lecturer at Princeton University during 1969–70, and then worked as an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles during 1970–71. He became a professor at Hebrew University in 1974, a position he continues to hold. He has been a visiting professor at the following universities: the University of Wisconsin (1977–78), the University of California, Berkeley (1978 and 1982), the University of Michigan (1984–85), at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia (1985), and Rutgers University, New Jersey (1985). He has been a distinguished visiting professor at Rutgers University since 1986. Academic career Shelah's personal webpage, lists 1123 published and accepted mathematical papers, as well as more than 100 preprints and papers in preparation, including joint papers with 288 co-authors; the American Mathematical Society's database MathSciNet lists 1147 published books and