Result of the 2018 Richard-Rado Prize

During the Symposium Diskrete Mathematik 2018, the Richard-Rado Prize was awarded. The prize is awarded every two years by the Fachgruppe Diskrete Mathematik of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) for outstanding dissertations in Discrete Mathematics. The prize is sponsored by Springer-Verlag and this time is endowed with 1000 EUR.


This year's prize winner is Dr. Isaac Mabillard, who was recognised for his dissertation "Eliminating Higher-Multiplicity Intersections: an $r$-fold Whitney Trick for the Topological Tverberg Conjecture", completed at the IST Austria in 2016. Supervisor of the dissertation was Prof. Uli Wagner, who received the prize on behalf of Isaac Mabillard.

Isaac Mabillard Uli Wagner


An honorable mention goes to Dr. Stefan Glock (University of Birmingham). His dissertation "Decompositions of Graphs and Hypergraphs", finished in 2017 at the University of Birmingham, was supervised by Prof. Daniela Kühn and Prof. Deryk Osthus.

Stefan Glock



From the Laudatio by the Juror László Babai (University of Chicago) during the award ceremony:

László Babai


Honorable mention for the 2018 Richard Rado Prize is awarded to

Stefan Glock
Ph. D. 2017, University of Birmingham
"Decompositions of Graphs and Hypergraphs"
Advisors Daniela Kühn and Deryk Osthus

for developing, together with his advisors and with coauthors Allan Lo and Richard Montgomery, powerful new techniques of hypergraph decomposition, including a new proof and far-reaching extensions of the Existence Theorem for combinatorial designs, a celebrated recent result by Peter Keevash that settled the long-standing central question of design theory.

The 2018 Richard Rado Prize is awarded to

Isaac Mabillard
Ph. D. 2016, Institute of Science and Technology Austria
"Eliminating Higher-Multiplicity Intersections: an $r$-fold Whitney Trick for the Topological Tverberg Conjecture"
Advisor Uli Wagner

for developing, together with his advisor, an obstruction theory for maps without global $r$-fold intersection points. The theory has led to the refutation of the "Topological Tverberg Conjecture," proposed in the late 70s by Imre Bárány and Helge Tverberg, and generally considered, in Gil Kalai’s words, "the Holy Grail of topological combinatorics."