David Conlon (born 1982) is an Irish mathematician who is a Professor of Mathematics at

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

. His research interests are in Hungarian-style combinatorics, particularly

Ramsey theory Ramsey theory, named after the British mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, is a branch of mathematics that focuses on the appearance of order in a substructure given a structure of a known size. Problems in Ramsey theory typically ask ...

extremal graph theory Extremal graph theory is a branch of combinatorics, itself an area of mathematics, that lies at the intersection of extremal combinatorics and graph theory. In essence, extremal graph theory studies how global properties of a graph influence local ...

, combinatorial number theory, and probabilistic methods in combinatorics. He proved the first superpolynomial improvement on the Erdős–Szekeres bound on diagonal Ramsey numbers. He won the

European Prize in Combinatorics The European Prize in Combinatorics is a prize for research in combinatorics, a mathematical discipline, which is awarded biennially at Eurocomb, the European conference on combinatorics, graph theory, and applications.. The prize was first awarde ...

in 2011 for his work in Ramsey theory and for his progress on Sidorenko's conjecture, and the

Whitehead Prize The Whitehead Prize is awarded yearly by the London Mathematical Society to multiple mathematicians working in the United Kingdom who are at an early stage of their career. The prize is named in memory of homotopy theory pioneer J. H. C. Whiteh ...

in 2019.

Life

Conlon represented Ireland in the

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except i ...

in 1998 and 1999. He was an undergraduate in

Trinity College Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

, where he was elected a Scholar in 2001 and graduated in 2003. He earned a PhD from

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III of England, Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world' ...

in 2009. In 2019 he moved to California Institute of Technology, having been a fellow of

Wadham College, Oxford Wadham College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. It is located in the centre of Oxford, at the intersection of Broad Street and Parks Road. Wadham College was founded in 1610 by Dorothy W ...

and Professor of Discrete Mathematics in the Mathematics Institute at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

. Conlon has worked in

, and he proved the first superpolynomial improvement on the Erdős–Szekeres bound on diagonal Ramsey numbers. He won the

in 2011, for his work in Ramsey theory and for his progress on Sidorenko's conjecture that, for any bipartite graph ''H'', uniformly random graphons have the fewest subgraphs isomorphic to ''H'' when the edge density is fixed. He was awarded the

in 2019 "in recognition of his many contributions to combinatorics".

References

External links

*
Home page
at Caltech
Home page
at Oxford * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Conlon, David 1982 births Living people Alumni of Trinity College Dublin Alumni of the University of Cambridge California Institute of Technology faculty Combinatorialists International Mathematical Olympiad participants 21st-century Irish mathematicians Scholars of Trinity College Dublin Place of birth missing (living people)