Professor Deryk Osthus

• Habilitation (Computer Science, 2004)
• PhD (Computer Science, 2000)

Deryk Osthus obtained a BA in Mathematics from Cambridge in 1996 and was awarded the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Mathematics (Part III) from the University of Cambridge in 1997.

In 2000, he obtained a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science at the Humboldt-University Berlin, where he also obtained his Habilitation in 2004. In 2003, he was awarded the European Prize in Combinatorics (jointly with Daniela Kühn).

In 2004, he moved to Birmingham to take up a position as a lecturer. He was promoted to Senior lecturer in 2010.

He was promoted to Professor in 2012.

Deryk Osthus is happy to supervise PhD students in Combinatorics. If you are interested, please email him.

RESEARCH THEMES
Combinatorics, especially Extremal and Probabilistic Graph Theory

RESEARCH ACTIVITY
The main research area of Deryk Osthus is Combinatorics. He has worked on random graphs, randomized algorithms and extremal graph theory. For example, he studied a general version of the perfect matching problem. (A perfect matching is a covering of the vertices of a graph by disjoint edges.) The problem of finding a perfect matching in a graph is well understood.

However, the situation becomes much more complicated if instead of covering the vertices by disjoint edges one aims to cover them by disjoint copies of a given graph H. Together with D. Kühn, he determined (for every graph H) the minimum degree which guarantees such a perfect `H-matching'. The solution involves a parameter which is closely related to the chromatic number of H.