Nurit Alon · CC BY 4.0

An Israeli mathematician whose Combinatorial Nullstellensatz became one of the standard tools of modern combinatorics, letting researchers prove existence results by treating polynomials as algebraic obstructions rather than counting objects directly. He has authored hundreds of papers spanning graph theory and theoretical computer science and holds professorships at Tel Aviv University and Princeton, a rare case of a working mathematician whose techniques get cited more than his name.