Richard Montgomery
Dr Richard Montgomery

Dr Richard Montgomery, a Birmingham Fellow in the School of Mathematics, has been awarded the European Prize in Combinatorics, a prestigious award made once every two years for excellent contributions in Combinatorics, Discrete Mathematics and their applications.

The prize, which is traditionally awarded during the biennial European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications, recognises the contribution of European researchers aged 35 and under to the field.

Richard is joint winner of the prize with his research collaborator Dr Alexey Pokrovskiy, a lecturer at Birkbeck’s Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics.  The judging panel stated that they had received a number of high level submissions in the 2019 round, but the pair were the unanimous winners “for their deep contributions to extremal and probabilistic combinatorics.”

Speaking of the award, Richard said:

"I was delighted to receive this prize with my co-author Alexey, and look forward to continuing this work in Birmingham."

Professor Deryk Osthus, Professor in Graph Theory, said:

This prestigious award highlights the ground-breaking nature of Richard's work. He has solved numerous long-standing problems of central importance to the field, such as on embedding spanning substructures in graphs. We are very happy that Richard was able to join the Combinatorics group at the School of Mathematics via the Birmingham fellowship scheme, which is the University's flagship programme for attracting young research leaders.