Kurt Mehlhorn - new honorary doctor at the IT Faculty
Kurt Mehlhorn, the director of Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken, has been conferred an honorary doctorate at the IT Faculty, University of Gothenburg.
Kurt Mehlhorn is a German theoretical computer scientist. He is the director of Max-Planck-Institute für Informatik in Saarbrücken, the foremost research institute in computer science in Germany. He has also served as the vice president of Max-Planck-Society from 2002 to 2008.
Kurt Mehlhorn has made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical computer science, including data structures, computational geometry, geometric computing, computer algebra, parallel computing, VLSI_design, complexity theory, combinatorial optimization, and graph algorithms. Besides theory, he co-developed LEDA, the library of efficient data types and algorithms, which is widely used in academia and industry. He has over 250 publications, 16000 citations and an H-index of 60.
No less impressive is his dedication to education and his service to research community. His series of textbooks "Data Structures and Algorithms" (Springer-Verlag 1984) were a standard reference in courses around the world. A large number of his Ph.D. students and Post-docs have become prominent scientists in many universities around the world. He founded the Max-Planck-Institute für Informatik and was one of the founders of the prestigious research center of Dagstuhl. He initiated ESA, the primary conference in the area of algorithm design, and has served many times as the PC-chair of several important theoretical conferences. His contribution to science is widely recognized. The long list of prizes, honors, and titles, as shown on his CV, demonstrate his stature and influence. The two especially important awards that he has won are EATCS award, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prize. The former is annually given to a distinguished theoretical computer scientist while the latter is the highest honor in science in Germany.
Kurt Mehlhorn has a long-standing association to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in Gothenburg through several generations of postdocs in his group, with whom he has had active research collaboration and publications.