Daniela Kühn (born 1973) is a German mathematician and the Mason Professor in Mathematics at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, England.Staff profile
University of Birmingham School of Mathematics, accessed 2012-09-12. She is known for her research in

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many appl ...

, and particularly in

extremal combinatorics Extremal combinatorics is a field of combinatorics, which is itself a part of mathematics. Extremal combinatorics studies how large or how small a collection of finite objects (numbers, graphs, vectors, sets, etc.) can be, if it has to satisfy ce ...

and graph theory.

Biography

Kühn earned the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Mathematics ( Cambridge Mathematical Tripos) from Cambridge University in 1997 and a Diploma in Mathematics from the Chemnitz University of Technology in 1999, followed by her doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 2001, under the supervision of

Reinhard Diestel Reinhard is a German, Austrian, Danish, and to a lesser extent Norwegian surname (from Germanic ''ragin'', counsel, and ''hart'', strong), and a spelling variant of Reinhardt. Persons with the given name * Reinhard of Blankenburg (after 1107 – 1 ...

. After working as a postdoctoral researcher at Hamburg and the Free University of Berlin, she moved to the University of Birmingham as a lecturer in 2004, and was awarded the Mason Professorship of Mathematics in 2010.

Research

In 2004 Kühn published a pair of papers in '' Combinatorica'' with her thesis advisor, Reinhard Diestel, concerning the cycle spaces of infinite graphs. In these graphs the appropriate generalizations of cycles and

spanning tree In the mathematical field of graph theory, a spanning tree ''T'' of an undirected graph ''G'' is a subgraph that is a tree which includes all of the vertices of ''G''. In general, a graph may have several spanning trees, but a graph that is not ...

s hinge on a proper treatment of the ends of the graph. Reviewer

R. Bruce Richter R. or r. may refer to: * ''Reign'', the period of time during which an Emperor, king, queen, etc., is ruler. * '' Rex'', abbreviated as R., the Latin word meaning King * ''Regina'', abbreviated as R., the Latin word meaning Queen * or , abbreviat ...

writes that "the results are extremely satisfactory, in the sense that standard theorems for finite graphs have perfect analogues" but that "there is nothing simple about any aspect of this work. It is a nice mix of graph-theoretic and topological ideas." In 2011, Kühn and her co-authors published a proof of

Sumner's conjecture Sumner's conjecture (also called Sumner's universal tournament conjecture) states that every orientation of every n-vertex tree is a subgraph of every (2n-2)-vertex tournament. David Sumner, a graph theorist at the University of South Carolina ...

, that every ''n''-vertex

polytree In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a polytree (also called directed tree, oriented tree; . or singly connected network.) is a directed acyclic graph whose underlying undirected graph is a tree. In other words, if we replace its ...

forms a subgraph of every (2''n'' − 2)-vertex tournament, for all but finitely many values of ''n''. MathSciNet reviewer K. B. Reid wrote that their proof "is an important and welcome development in tournament theory".

Awards and honours

In 2002, Kühn won the Richard Rado Prize, a biennial best dissertation award given by the Section for Discrete Mathematics of the German Mathematical Society. Together with

Deryk Osthus Deryk Osthus is the Professor of Graph Theory at the School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham. He is known for his research in combinatorics, predominantly in extremal and probabilistic graph theory. Career Osthus earned a B.A. in mathemat ...

and Alain Plagne, she was one of the first winners of the European Prize in Combinatorics in 2003. Together with Osthus, she was a recipient of the 2014

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. Whitehea ...

of the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...

for "their many results in extremal graph theory and related areas. Several of their papers resolve long-standing open problems in the area." She was an Invited Speaker at the 2014

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

, in Seoul. and appointed as a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder in 2015.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kuhn, Daniela Living people 21st-century German mathematicians German women mathematicians Graph theorists University of Hamburg alumni Academics of the University of Birmingham Whitehead Prize winners 1973 births Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders 21st-century women mathematicians 21st-century German women