Nir Lazarovich, a mathematician and  Postdoctoral Fellow at ETH Zurich. Prior to this, he was a PhD student at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.  His dissertation on “Non-Positively Curved Homogeneous Polygonal Complexes” was written under the supervision of Prof. Michah Sageev.

As a part of his doctoral research, Nir studied “homogeneous” CAT (0) cube complexes, which have the same local geometric data at every vertex. He found a local condition, called star transitivity, which corresponds precisely to the existence of a unique CAT (0) cube complex. This ground-breaking result now focuses interest on a new special class of CAT (0) cube complexes that often have a high level of symmetry. Nir’s result also identified a new combinatorial condition on simplicial complexes that should be of independent interest to combinatorists studying these phenomena.

Nir studied a recently discovered type of naturally occurring polygonal complexes and answered questions concerning the uniqueness of these objects, resulting in the discovery of new and fascinating polygonal complexes with rich symmetry groups. These results were presented at the Geometric Group Theory conference at the Technion and were recently submitted for publication. In 2010, Nir was awarded the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Fellowship. In 2011 he joined the Technion’s direct-track PhD program, allowing him to continue investigating the unique properties of these complexes.

After finishing his PhD Nir was awarded  the Technion Alumni Organization PhD Prize.