The Kepler conjecture, named after the 17th-century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, is a mathematical theorem about sphere packing in three-dimensional Euclidean space. It states that no arrangement of equally sized spheres filling space has a greater average density than that of the cubic close packing and hexagonal close packing arrangements. The density of these arrangements is around 74.05%.
The Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of $1,500 each are presented at each (triennial) International Symposium of the MOS. Originally, the prizes were paid out of a memorial fund administered by the AMS that was established by friends of the late Delbert Ray Fulkerson to encourage mathematical excellence in the fields of research exemplified by his work. The prizes are now funded by an endowment administered by MPS.
Paul D. Seymour is a British mathematician known for his work in discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. He was responsible for important progress on regular matroids and totally unimodular matrices, the four colour theorem, linkless embeddings, graph minors and structure, the perfect graph conjecture, the Hadwiger conjecture, claw-free graphs, χ-boundedness, and the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture. Many of his recent papers are available from his website.
László Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2007 to 2010 and the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020.
In geometric graph theory, the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, named after Hugo Hadwiger and Edward Nelson, asks for the minimum number of colors required to color the plane such that no two points at distance 1 from each other have the same color. The answer is unknown, but has been narrowed down to one of the numbers 5, 6 or 7. The correct value may depend on the choice of axioms for set theory.
The Borsuk problem in geometry, for historical reasons incorrectly called Borsuk's conjecture, is a question in discrete geometry. It is named after Karol Borsuk.
Oded Schramm was an Israeli-American mathematician known for the invention of the Schramm–Loewner evolution (SLE) and for working at the intersection of conformal field theory and probability theory.
In mathematical programming and polyhedral combinatorics, the Hirsch conjecture is the statement that the edge-vertex graph of an n-facet polytope in d-dimensional Euclidean space has diameter no more than n − d. That is, any two vertices of the polytope must be connected to each other by a path of length at most n − d. The conjecture was first put forth in a letter by Warren M. Hirsch to George B. Dantzig in 1957 and was motivated by the analysis of the simplex method in linear programming, as the diameter of a polytope provides a lower bound on the number of steps needed by the simplex method. The conjecture is now known to be false in general.
Polyhedral combinatorics is a branch of mathematics, within combinatorics and discrete geometry, that studies the problems of counting and describing the faces of convex polyhedra and higher-dimensional convex polytopes.
Gil Kalai is the Henry and Manya Noskwith Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professor of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and adjunct professor of mathematics and of computer science at Yale University.
Maria Chudnovsky is an Israeli-American mathematician working on graph theory and combinatorial optimization. She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.
Discrete & Computational Geometry is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal published quarterly by Springer. Founded in 1986 by Jacob E. Goodman and Richard M. Pollack, the journal publishes articles on discrete geometry and computational geometry.
Van H. Vu is a Vietnamese mathematician, Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at Yale University.
Robin Thomas was a mathematician working in graph theory at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
In geometry, Kalai's 3d conjecture is a conjecture on the polyhedral combinatorics of centrally symmetric polytopes, made by Gil Kalai in 1989. It states that every d-dimensional centrally symmetric polytope has at least 3d nonempty faces.
Francisco (Paco) Santos Leal is a Spanish mathematician at the University of Cantabria, known for finding a counterexample to the Hirsch conjecture in polyhedral combinatorics. In 2015 he won the Fulkerson Prize for this research.
Karim Alexander Adiprasito is a German mathematician at the University of Copenhagen and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who works in combinatorics. He completed his Ph.D. in 2013 at Free University Berlin under the supervision of Günter M. Ziegler. He has been a professor at the Hebrew University since 2015, and at University of Copenhagen since 2019. He is of German and Indonesian descent, and bears an Indonesian surname.
The Kahn–Kalai conjecture, also known as the expectation threshold conjecture, is a conjecture in the field of graph theory and statistical mechanics, proposed by Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai in 2006.
Jinyoung Park is a South Korean mathematician at Stanford University working in combinatorics and graph theory. She received widespread recognition in 2022 for publishing a preprint with a 6-page proof of the Kahn–Kalai conjecture with Huy Tuan Pham.
