The European Prize in Combinatorics was awarded on Wednesday at the Eurocomb'25 conference, as part of a ceremonial session held at the headquarters of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications is held every two years and the Rényi Institute is the organizer of this prestigious event for the second time. The award of the European Combinatorics Prize is decided by a committee established specifically for this purpose, chaired by Jaroslav Nešetřil. The laureates received the highest award in the field of combinatorics from him and from the two Hungarian Abel Prize-winning mathematicians, Endre Szemerédi and László Lovász. This award is open to combinatorics experts from Europe who are no older than 35 years old, for their outstanding achievements.
Three European Combinatorics Prizes were awarded this year. Matija Bucić (Princeton University) received the prize for his outstanding achievements in Ramsey theory (Fishburn and Graham's problem), graph theory (Erdős-Gallai conjecture), and discrete geometry.
Olivér Janzer (Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne) received the award for solving several important problems in the fields of extremal and random graphs, as well as regular subgraphs (Erdős, Simonovits, Sauber problems).
Cosmin Pohoata (Emory University) and Dmitrii Zakharov (MIT) also shared the award for their important achievements in the following areas: combinatorial geometry (Heilbronn triangle problem), extremal graph theory (Erdős “box” problem), and the variegated “matching” problem of hypergraphs.
The 2024 Euler Medal was also awarded during the Eurocomb’25 conference. This award is given by the American-based Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications, founded in 1990, to mathematicians who have made outstanding contributions to combinatorics research. The 2024 Euler Medal recipient is Academician Gyula Katona, former director of the Rényi Institute, who received the award for his fundamental achievements and pioneering work in the field of extremal set theory.
