Florian Frick, BMS alumnus and doctoral graduate of TU Berlin, was awarded the Richard Rado Prize for his 2015 BMS PhD thesis entitled "Combinatorial Restrictions on Cell Complexes". The Rado Prize is awarded biennially by the Discrete Mathematics Section of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) for an outstanding PhD thesis submitted in the last two years. According to the condition of this award, it is the task of one prestigious international mathematician (who remains anonymous until the day of the award ceremony) to decide which thesis is most worthy of the prize. This year's juror was Prof. Ben J. Green (U Oxford), who selected the final prize winner from ten first-class nominations.

 

Florian, who completed his PhD at TU Berlin under the supervision of BMS deputy chair Prof. John M. Sullivan, graduated with the honor of summa cum laude in 2015. In his thesis, he developed a "constraint method" which he used to derive, from very recent topological work by Isaac Mabillard and Uli Wagner (IST Austria), spectacular counter-examples to the "Topological Tverberg Conjecture" from 1976. After finishing his PhD, Florian moved to Cornell University, where he currently holds the position of an H. C. Wang Assistant Professor.

Florian was presented with his award at the Symposium on Discrete Mathematics held at the Zuse Institute Berlin on 15-16 July 2016. It came with prize money in the sum of 1000 euros.

Congratulaitions Florian!