Michael Kleber

Mathematician

I now work at Google. Send me email at my_firstname.my_lastname@gmail.com.

I was an assistant professor in the mathematics department at Brandeis from 2001 to 2004. I then worked at the Broad Institute at MIT, on mathematical and computational problems associated with whole genome assembly, and at BBN Technologies, on problems in machine learning for speech recognition. I now work at Google.

Before coming to Brandeis, I was an NSF post-doc at MIT, hosted by Richard Stanley. I received my Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley in 1998 under the direction of Nicolai Reshetikhin (my family tree, thanks to the MGP).

Papers and cv
On the lighter side, here is a crossword puzzle I wrote, which appeared in the Mathematical Intelligencer (25#1, Winter '03). Recommended for mathematicians only.
Here is a second one, Weirdoes, which appeared in MI 27#3, Summer 2005. More accessible, not as good.

Update 7/14/2007: I no longer hold the world's record for longest known game of "Beggar Your Neighbor". Richard Mann and Nick Wu ("The Beggar-Your-Neighbour Research Group, Oxford, UK") have found a 975-trick game:

1:-A-K--QJJ------Q-----AK--- 2:--K----K----QA---J-AJQ---- This far outlasts my previous recordholder, at 893 tricks: 1:-J--KA----A-Q--Q-A----KJ-- 2:A------QKJ--Q-------KJ---- The real question, "Is there an infinite game of BYN?", is discussed in the "Unsolved Problems" section of the American Math Monthly in February, 1999, written up by Marc Paulhus. (The article at JSTOR, if your institution has access.) The new edition of Winning Ways contains the erroneous claim that this question was since solved (in the affirmative and by Marc). He denies it.