When and where was Judea Pearl born?
Judea Pearl entered the world on the 4th of September 1936 in Tel Aviv. This city sat within the British Mandate for Palestine at that time.
Judea Pearl entered the world on the 4th of September 1936 in Tel Aviv. This city sat within the British Mandate for Palestine at that time.
Pearl earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Technion and received a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering in 1961. He later obtained another Master of Science in physics from Rutgers University and completed his PhD in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1965.
The Association for Computing Machinery recognized this work with the Turing Award in 2011 for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through probabilistic and causal reasoning. His theories transformed how fields like medicine understand cause and effect while statistics became more rigorous thanks to his structural approach.
In 2002 tragedy struck when his son Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Pakistan and murdered by terrorists connected with Al-Qaeda. This event led Judea and family members to create the Daniel Pearl Foundation and fueled decades of activism and reconciliation efforts between Jews and Muslims.
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences on the 29th of April 2014. The academic community bestowed numerous awards upon Judea Pearl over several decades including a Foreign Member of the Royal Society designation in 2025.