Robin Thomas, Professor in the School of Mathematics with a courtesy appointment in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and three colleagues have been awarded a 2009 Fulkerson Prize.

Administered by jointly by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS), the Fulkerson Prize was created in 1979 in honor of the late mathematician Delbert Ray Fulkerson. The Prize includes a $1500 award and recognizes outstanding papers in the field of discrete mathematics. No more than three prizes are awarded every three years.

Dr. Thomas received the award on August 23rd at MPS's 20th International Symposium of MPS alongside colleagues Maria Chudnovsky of Columbia University, Neil Robertson of the Ohio State University, and Paul Seymour of Princeton University. The research team's paper "The Strong Perfect Graph Theorem," published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2006, resolves a conjecture proposed in 1960 by Claude Berge, one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory.

Gary Parker, Professor of ISyE and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, described the Fulkerson Prize as a "very serious award" and lauded Thomas's achievement as "quite rare." In fact, Thomas is one of only four individuals to win the Fulkerson Prize multiple times, among colleagues Robertson and Seymour. The trio previously collaborated on the paper "Hadwiger's Conjecture for K6-Free Graphs" for which they won a 1994 Fulkerson Prize.

A renowned graph theorist, Robin Thomas serves as the Director of the Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO) doctoral program, a multidisciplinary venture sponsored by the College of Computing, the Stewart School of ISyE, and the School of Mathematics. He received his Doctor of Natural Sciences from Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, in 1985.