Simons Collaborationon Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation

Alex Best

Alex Best received his PhD at Boston University in 2021 under the supervision of Jennifer Balakrishnan. He subsequently held a postdoctoral position at VU Amsterdam working with Sander Dahmen as part of the project “New Diophantine Directions.” Alex works on explicit Diophantine problems and the uses of computer formalization of mathematical knowledge for mathematicians, reducing the barrier to entry to using such tools. In Fall 2022, Alex started a postdoctoral position at King’s College London; as of 2025, he is a researcher at Harmonic.

Eran Assaf

Eran Assaf obtained his doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2017. He joined the team in September 2019 as a postdoc at Dartmouth College. His main research interests are the p-adic local Langlands correspondence, Shimura varieties, p-adic representations of p-adic groups and computation of fundamental domains for arithmetic modular groups. As of 2025, he is a Research Scientist on the Magma Project at MIT.