Elchanan Mossel (Hebrew: אלחנן מוסל) is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His work on discrete Fourier analysis and functions with low influence includes important contributions such as the proof of the "Majority is Stablest" conjecture, together with Ryan O’Donnell and Krzysztof Oleszkiewicz,[1] and the proof of the optimality of the Goemans–Williamson MAX-CUT algorithm (assuming the Unique Games Conjecture),[2] with Subhash Khot, Guy Kindler and Ryan O’Donnell.
He connected it to Steel's conjecture in Phylogenetic reconstruction, partially in work with Constantinos Daskalakis and Sébastien Roch.
[3][4] These result links the extremality of the Ising model on the Bethe lattice to a phase transition in the amount of data required for statistical inference on phylogenetic trees.
Mossel held a postdoctoral position at Microsoft Research and was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley before becoming a Professor at UC Berkeley, the Weizmann Institute, the University of Pennsylvania and finally MIT.