Bernd Sturmfels

Research Areas

Biography

Bernd Sturmfels received doctoral degrees in 1987 from the University of Washington and the Technical University Darmstadt, and an honorary doctorate in 2015 from the Goethe University Frankfurt. After postdoctoral years in Minneapolis and Linz, he taught at Cornell University, before joining UC Berkeley in 1995, where he is Professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science. Since 2017 he is a director at the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig. In 2018 he became Honarary Professor at Technical University Berlin and University of Leipzig. His awards include a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, a Clay Senior Scholarship, a Humboldt Senior Research Prize, the SIAM von Neumann Lecturership, the Sarlo Distinguished Mentoring Award, and the George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics. He is a fellow of the AMS and SIAM, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Sturmfels mentored 50 doctoral students and numerous postdocs, and he authored ten books and 250 research articles, in combinatorics, commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, and their applications to fields like statistics, optimization, and computational biology.

His honors include a National Young Investigator Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship. Sturmfels served as von Neumann Professor at TU Munich in Summer 2002, as the Hewlett-Packard Research Professor at MSRI Berkeley in 2003/04, and he was a Clay Senior Scholar in 2004. A leading experimentalist among mathematicians, Sturmfels has authored or edited 13 books and about 150 research articles, in the areas of combinatorics, algebraic geometry, symbolic computation and their applications.

Education

  • 1987, Dr.rer.nat., Mathematics, Technical University Darmstadt, Germany
  • 1987, Ph.D., Mathematics, University of Washington, Seattle
  • 1985, Diplom, Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University Darmstadt, Germany

Awards, Memberships and Fellowships