Fulkerson Prize

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.

Winners

• 1979:
  • Richard M. Karp for classifying many important NP-complete problems.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken for the four color theorem.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Paul Seymour for generalizing the max-flow min-cut theorem to matroids.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• 1982:
  • D.B. Judin, Arkadi Nemirovski, Leonid Khachiyan, Martin Grötschel, László Lovász and Alexander Schrijver for the ellipsoid method in linear programming and combinatorial optimization.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite news.</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • G. P. Egorychev and D. I. Falikman for proving van der Waerden's conjecture that the matrix with all entries equal has the smallest permanent of any doubly stochastic matrix.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• 1985:
  • Jozsef Beck for tight bounds on the discrepancy of arithmetic progressions.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • H. W. Lenstra Jr. for using the geometry of numbers to solve integer programs with few variables in time polynomial in the number of constraints.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Eugene M. Luks for a polynomial time graph isomorphism algorithm for graphs of bounded maximum degree.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite news.</ref>
• 1988:
  • Éva Tardos for finding minimum cost circulations in strongly polynomial time.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Narendra Karmarkar for Karmarkar's algorithm for linear programming.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• 1991:
  • Martin E. Dyer, Alan M. Frieze and Ravindran Kannan for random-walk-based approximation algorithms for the volume of convex bodies.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Alfred Lehman for 0,1-matrix analogues of the theory of perfect graphs.<ref>Alfred Lehman, "The width-length inequality and degenerate projective planes," W. Cook and P. D. Seymour (eds.), Polyhedral Combinatorics, DIMACS Series in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, volume 1, (American Mathematical Society, 1990) pp. 101-105.</ref>
  • Nikolai E. Mnev for Mnev's universality theorem, that every semialgebraic set is equivalent to the space of realizations of an oriented matroid.<ref>Nikolai E. Mnev, "The universality theorems on the classification problem of configuration varieties and convex polytope varieties," O. Ya. Viro (ed.), Topology and Geometry-Rohlin Seminar, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1346 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1988) pp. 527-544.</ref>
• 1994:
  • Louis Billera for finding bases of piecewise-polynomial function spaces over triangulations of space.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Gil Kalai for making progress on the Hirsch conjecture by proving subexponential bounds on the diameter of d-dimensional polytopes with n facets.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Neil Robertson, Paul Seymour and Robin Thomas for the six-color case of Hadwiger's conjecture.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• 1997:
  • Jeong Han Kim for finding the asymptotic growth rate of the Ramsey numbers R(3,t).<ref>Template:Cite journal.</ref>
• 2000:
  • Michel X. Goemans and David P. Williamson for approximation algorithms based on semidefinite programming.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Michele Conforti, Gérard Cornuéjols, and M. R. Rao for recognizing balanced 0-1 matrices in polynomial time.<ref>Michele Conforti, Gérard Cornuéjols, and M. R. Rao, "Decomposition of balanced matrices", Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 77 (2): 292–406, 1999.</ref><ref>Template:Cite news.</ref>
• 2003:
  • J. F. Geelen, A. M. H. Gerards and A. Kapoor for the GF(4) case of Rota's conjecture on matroid minors.<ref>J. F. Geelen, A. M. H. Gerards and A. Kapoor, "The Excluded Minors for GF(4)-Representable Matroids," Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 79 (2): 247–2999, 2000.</ref><ref name="fpc03">2003 Fulkerson Prize citation, retrieved 2012-08-18.</ref>
  • Bertrand Guenin for a forbidden minor characterization of the weakly bipartite graphs (graphs whose bipartite subgraph polytope is 0-1).<ref>Bertrand Guenin, "A characterization of weakly bipartite graphs," Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 83 (1): 112–168, 2001.</ref><ref name="fpc03"/>
  • Satoru Iwata, Lisa Fleischer, Satoru Fujishige, and Alexander Schrijver for showing submodular minimization to be strongly polynomial.<ref>Satoru Iwata, Lisa Fleischer, Satoru Fujishige, "A combinatorial strongly polynomial algorithm for minimizing submodular functions," Journal of the ACM, 48 (4): 761–777, 2001.</ref><ref>Alexander Schrijver, "A combinatorial algorithm minimizing submodular functions in strongly polynomial time," Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B 80 (2): 346–355, 2000.</ref><ref name="fpc03"/>
• 2006:
  • Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena, for the AKS primality test.<ref>Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena, "PRIMES is in P," Annals of Mathematics, 160 (2): 781–793, 2004.</ref><ref>Template:Cite news.</ref><ref name="fpc06">2006 Fulkerson Prize citation, retrieved 2012-08-19.</ref>
  • Mark Jerrum, Alistair Sinclair and Eric Vigoda, for approximating the permanent.<ref>Mark Jerrum, Alistair Sinclair and Eric Vigoda, "A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with nonnegative entries," Journal of the ACM, 51 (4): 671–697, 2004.</ref><ref name="fpc06"/>
  • Neil Robertson and Paul Seymour, for the Robertson–Seymour theorem showing that graph minors form a well-quasi-ordering.<ref>Neil Robertson and Paul Seymour, "Graph Minors. XX. Wagner's conjecture," Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 92 (2): 325–357, 2004.</ref><ref name="fpc06"/>
• 2009:
  • Maria Chudnovsky, Neil Robertson, Paul Seymour, and Robin Thomas, for the strong perfect graph theorem.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="fpc09">2009 Fulkerson Prize citation, retrieved 2012-08-19.</ref>
  • Daniel A. Spielman and Shang-Hua Teng, for smoothed analysis of linear programming algorithms.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="fpc09"/>
  • Thomas C. Hales and Samuel P. Ferguson, for proving the Kepler conjecture on the densest possible sphere packings.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="fpc09"/>
• 2012:
  • Sanjeev Arora, Satish Rao, and Umesh Vazirani for improving the approximation ratio for graph separators and related problems from <math>O(\log n)</math> to <math>O(\sqrt{\log n})</math>.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • Anders Johansson, Jeff Kahn, and Van H. Vu for determining the threshold of edge density above which a random graph can be covered by disjoint copies of a given smaller graph.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • László Lovász and Balázs Szegedy for characterizing subgraph multiplicity in sequences of dense graphs.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• 2015:
  • Francisco Santos Leal for a counter-example of the Hirsch conjecture.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>2015 Fulkerson Prize citation, retrieved 2015-07-18.</ref>
• 2018:
  • Robert Morris, Yoshiharu Kohayakawa, Simon Griffiths, Peter Allen, and Julia Böttcher for The chromatic thresholds of graphs
  • Thomas Rothvoss for his work on the extension complexity of the matching polytope.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
• 2021:
  • Béla Csaba, Daniela Kühn, Allan Lo, Deryk Osthus, and Andrew Treglown for Proof of the 1-factorization and Hamilton decomposition conjectures
  • Jin-Yi Cai and Xi Chen for Complexity of Counting CSP with Complex Weights
  • Ken-Ichi Kawarabayashi and Mikkel Thorup for Deterministic Edge Connectivity in Near-Linear Time

Source: Mathematical Optimization Society official website.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

• 2024:
  • Ben Cousins and Santosh Vempala for Gaussian cooling and <math>O^*(n^3)</math> algorithms for volume and Gaussian volume
  • Zilin Jiang, Jonathan Tidor, Yuan Yao, Shengtong Zhang, and Yufei Zhao for Equiangular lines with a fixed angle
  • Nathan Keller and Noam Lifshitz for The junta method for hypergraphs and the Erdős–Chvátal simplex conjecture

Source: American Mathematical Society official website.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

See also

• List of mathematics awards

External links

• Official web page (MOS)
• Official site with award details (AMS website)
• AMS archive of past prize winners