Shmuel Gal joined Department of Statistics in 1994; prior to that he had been a Research Staff Member  and Program Manager Operations Research in  IBM Israel Science and Technology.  Shmuel Gal received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (thesis advisor: Aryeh Dvoretzky). He devised Gal’s accurate tables method for the computer evaluation of elementary functions, and  in 1993 with Zvi Yehudai developed a new algorithm for sorting which is used by IBM.  He  made several significant contributions to the area of search games; in particular, Gal solved the princess and monster game which has been a famous open problem in the 1960s and 1970s.  

 Search games,  rendezvous problems, operations research.    

• S. Gal (1980). Search Games, Academic Press.
• S. Alpern and S. Gal (2003). The Theory of Search Games and Rendezvous. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• S. Alpern and S. Gal (1988). A Mixed strategy minimax theorem without compactness. SIAM J. Control and Optimization 26, 1357-1361.
• D. Chazan and S. Gal (1977).  A Markovian Model for a Perishable Product Inventory. Management Science 23, 512-521.
• S. Gal (1979). Search Games with Mobile and Immobile hider.  SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization  17, 99-122.
• S. Gal and B. Klots (1995). Optimal partitioning which maximizes the sum of the weighted averages. Operations Research 43, 500-508.
• S. Gal (1999). Rendezvous search on the line. Operations Research 47, 974-976.
• S. Gal, M. Landsberger and A. Nemirovski (2007). Participation in auctions. Games and Economic Behavior 60, 75-103.
• S. Alpern, R. Fokkink, S. Gal and M. Timmer (2013). On search games that include ambush. SIAM J. Cont. and Optimization 51, 4544-4556.
• S. Gal and Casas, J. (2014). Succession of hide–seek and pursuit–evasion at heterogeneous locations. Journal of The Royal Society Interface  11 (94).