American Mathematical Society Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize


The Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of US$1500 each are presented at each (triennial) International Symposium of the MPS. 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.

1979 Richard M Karp
... for 'On the computational complexity of combinatorial problems', Networks 5 (1975), 45-68.
          Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken
... for 'Every planar map is four colorable, Part I: Discharging', Illinois Journal of Mathematics 21 (1977), 429-490.
          Paul D Seymour
... for 'The matroids with the max-flow min-cut property', Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B 23 (1977), 189-222.
1982 D B Judin and A S Nemirovskii
... for 'Informational complexity and effective methods of solution for convex extremal problems', Ekonomika i Matematicheskie Metody 12 (1976), 357-369.
          L G Khachiyan
... for 'A polynomial algorithm in linear programming', Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Doklady 244 (1979), 1093-1096.
          G P Egorychev
... for 'The solution of van der Waerden's problem for permanents', Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Doklady 258 (1981), 1041-1044.
          D I Falikman
... for 'A proof of the van der Waerden conjecture on the permanent of a doubly stochastic matrix', Matematicheskie Zametki 29 (1981), 931-938.
          M Grötschel, L Lovasz and A Schrijver
... for 'The ellipsoid method and its consequences in combinatorial optimization', Combinatorica 1 (1981), 169-197.
1985 Jozsef Beck
... for 'Roth's estimate of the discrepancy of integer sequences is nearly sharp', Combinatorica 1 (4),319-325, (1981).
1985 H. W. Lenstra, Jr.
... for 'Integer programming with a fixed number of variables', Mathematics of Operations Research 8 (4), 538-548, (1983).
          Eugene M. Luks
... for 'Isomorphism of graphs of bounded valence can be tested in polynomial time', Journal of Computer and System Sciences 25 (1), 42-65, (1982).
1988 Eva Tardos
... for 'A strongly polynomial minimum cost circulation algorithm', Combinatorica 5 (1985), pp. 247-256.
1988 Narendra Karmarkar
... for 'A new polynomial-time algorithm for linear programming', Combinatorica 4 (1984), pp. 373-395.
1991 Martin Dyer, Alan Frieze, and Ravi Kannan
... for 'A random polynomial time algorithm for approximating the volume of convex bodies', Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 38/1 (1991) 1-17.
Alfred Lehman
... for '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) 101-105.
Nikolai E Mnev
... for '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) 527-544.
1994 Louis Billera
... for 'Homology of smooth splines: Generic triangulations and a conjecture of Strang', Transactions of the AMS 310 (1988) 325-340.
Gil Kalai
... for 'Upper bounds for the diameter and height of graphs of the convex polyhedra', Discrete and Computational Geometry 8 (1992) 363-372.
          Neil Robertson, Paul D Seymour, and Robin Thomas
... for 'Hadwiger's conjecture for K6; free graphs', Combinatorica 13 (1993) 279-361.
1997 Jeong Han Kim
... for 'The Ramsey Number R(3,t)R(3, t) Has Order of Magnitude t2/logtt^{2}/\log t', Random Structures and Algorithms 7, (3) 1995, 173-207.
2000 Michel X Goemans and David P. Williamson
... for 'Improved approximation algorithms for the maximum cut and satisfiability probelsm using semi-definite programming', Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 42 (1995), no. 6, 1115-1145.
Michele Conforti, Gerard Cornuejols, and M. R. Rao
... for 'Decomposition of balanced matrices', Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 77 (1999), no. 2, 292-406.
2003 J. F. Geelen, A. M. H. Gerards, and A. Kapoor
... for 'The Excluded Minors for GF(4)GF(4)-Representable Matroids', Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B, 79 (2000), no. 2, 247-299.
Bertrand Guenin
... for 'A characterization of weakly bipartite graphs', Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B, 83 (2001), no. 1, 112-168.
Satoru Iwata, Lisa Fleischer, and Satoru Fujishige
... for 'A combinatorial strongly polynomial algorithm for minimizing submodular functions', Journal of the ACM 48, July 2001, no. 4, 761-777.
Alexander Schrijver
... for 'A combinatorial algorithm minimizing submodular functions in strongly polynomial time', Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B 80 (2000), no. 2, 346-355.
2006 Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena
... for 'PRIMES is in P', Annals of Mathematics 160, issue 2, 2004, 781-793
Mark Jerrum, Alistair Sinclair and Eric Vigoda
... for 'A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with nonnegative entries', J. ACM 51, Issue 4, 2004, 671-697.
Neil Robertson and Paul D Seymour
... for 'Graph Minors. XX. Wagner's conjecture', Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B 92 (2) 2004, 325-357.
2009 Maria Chudnovsky, Neil Robertson, Paul Seymour, and Robin Thomas
... for 'The strong perfect graph theorem', Annals of Mathematics, volume 164, issue 1, 2006, pages 51- 229.
Daniel A. Spielman and Shang-Hua Teng
... for 'Smoothed analysis of algorithms: Why the simplex algorithm usually takes polynomial time', Journal of the ACM, volume 51, issue 3, 2004, pages 385- 463.
Thomas C. Hales
... for 'A proof of the Kepler conjecture', Annals of Mathematics, volume 162,issue 3, 2005, pages 1063-1183
Samuel P. Ferguson
... for 'Sphere Packings, V. Pentahedral Prisms', Discrete and Computational Geometry, volume 36, issue 1, 2006, 167- 204.
2012 Sanjeev Arora, Satish Rao, and Umesh Vazirani
... for improving the approximation ratio for graph separators and related problems.
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.
László Lovász and Balázs Szegedy
... for characterizing subgraph multiplicity in sequences of dense graphs.
2015 Francisco Santos
.. for 'A Counterexample to the Hirsch Conjecture', Annals of Mathematics, 2012.
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
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
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