Amir Alexander is a historian, author, and academic who studies the interconnections between mathematics and its cultural and historical setting. Born in Rehovot, Israel on April 7, 1963, he grew up in Jerusalem where his father, Shlomo Alexander, was a professor of physics at the UCLA and the Hebrew University and his mother, Esther Alexander, was an economist and social activist. He obtained a B.S. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1988 in mathematics and history, before moving to the United States, where he obtained an M.A. in history of science from Stanford University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in history of science from Stanford University in 1996.