Robin Thomas (mathematician)

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Robin Thomas (* August 22, 1962 ; † March 26, 2020 ) was a Czech mathematician who dealt with graph theory , combinatorics and algorithm theory.

Thomas received his doctorate in 1985 from the Charles University in Prague under Jaroslav Nešetřil . From 1989 he was at the Georgia Institute of Technology , where he later became a professor.

In 2005 Thomas and Paul Seymour , Maria Chudnovsky and Neil Robertson proved Claude Berge's strong conjecture, which has been open since 1960, for perfect graphs . With Seymour, Robertson and Daniel P. Sanders (who received his doctorate in 1993) he was also involved in a program to simplify the four-color theorem, which resulted in an alternative proof (to that of Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken). With Robertson and Seymour he gave complete criteria for when a graph without links (i.e. the number of links of two cycles of the embedded graph is zero, it then has a "flat embedding") can be embedded in three-dimensional space (namely, that it has no minors that are isomorphic to any of 7 graphs from the Petersen family).

With Seymour and Robertson he proved the generally still open Hadwiger conjecture from graph theory for k = 6 colors.

With Seymour and Robertson he received the Fulkerson Prize in 1994 (for their work on the Hadwiger conjecture) and in 2009 (additionally with Maria Chudnovsky) . He was a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .

He was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2006 (Pfaffian Orientation of Graphs).

He died of ALS on March 26 at the age of 57 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robin Thomas: An Update on the Four Color Theorem. In: Notices AMS. 1998 (PDF file, 270 kB).
  2. Robin Thomas. In: computationalcomplexity.org. March 28, 2020, accessed April 7, 2020 .