Margit Voigt is a German mathematician specializing in

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of ''graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conne ...

and

graph coloring In graph theory, graph coloring is a special case of graph labeling; it is an assignment of labels traditionally called "colors" to elements of a graph subject to certain constraints. In its simplest form, it is a way of coloring the vertices o ...

. She is a professor of

operations research Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve deci ...

at the University of Applied Sciences Dresden. Voigt completed her Ph.D. in 1992 at the

Technische Universität Ilmenau The Technische Universität Ilmenau (''Ilmenau University of Technology'', TU Ilmenau) is a German public research university located in Ilmenau, Thuringia, central Germany. Founded in 1894, it has five academic departments (faculties) with abo ...

. Her dissertation, ''Über die chromatische Zahl einer speziellen Klasse unendlicher Graphen'' 'On the chromatic number of a special class of infinite graphs''was jointly supervised by Rainer Bodendiek and

Hansjoachim Walther Hansjoachim Walther (16 December 1939 – 17 January 2005) was a German politician and mathematician. He was leader of the German Social Union, a right-wing party modelled after the Bavarian CSU, during the ''Wende'', serving as their parlia ...

. Her results include the first known

planar graph In graph theory, a planar graph is a graph that can be embedded in the plane, i.e., it can be drawn on the plane in such a way that its edges intersect only at their endpoints. In other words, it can be drawn in such a way that no edges cross ...

that requires five colors for

list coloring In graph theory, a branch of mathematics, list coloring is a type of graph coloring where each vertex can be restricted to a list of allowed colors. It was first studied in the 1970s in independent papers by Vizing and by Erdős, Rubin, and Taylor ...

, and a counterexample to a related conjecture that list coloring of planar graphs requires at most one more color than

for the same graphs.

References

20th-century German mathematicians 21st-century German mathematicians Women mathematicians Graph theorists Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Ilmenau University of Technology alumni {{Germany-mathematician-stub