Prize History

Citation

The 2021 George Pólya Prize in Combinatorics is awarded jointly to Assefaw H. Gebremedhin, Fredrik Manne, and Alex Pothen for efficient graph coloring algorithms and codes with applications to Jacobian and Hessian matrix computations. 

• Cynthia Phillips (Chair)
• Tanya Berger-Wolf
• Timothy A. Davis
• Jesus De Loera
• Christine Heitsch

Citation

The 2016 George Pólya Prize in Combinatorics is awarded jointly to József Balogh, Robert Morris and Wojciech Samotij and to David Saxton and Andrew Thomason for their path-breaking work on the container theorem and its applications.

• Alex Pothen (Chair)
• Richard A. Brualdi
• Karen L. Collins
• David P. Williamson

Citation

The 2016 George Pólya Prize in Combinatorics is awarded jointly to József Balogh, Robert Morris and Wojciech Samotij and to David Saxton and Andrew Thomason for their path-breaking work on the container theorem and its applications.

Selection Committee

• Alex Pothen (Chair)
• Richard A. Brualdi
• Karen L. Collins
• David P. Williamson

Citation

The 2012 George Pólya Prize is awarded to Vojtěch Rödl and Mathias Schacht for their seminal work on the regularity method for hypergraphs. Rödl and Schacht have produced a central body of results developing, extending, and consolidating Szemerédi’s regularity method for hypergraphs. They have also shown how this method leads to remarkable results like the generalized hypergraph removal lemma and the theorem that every decidable, hereditary property of k-uniform hypergraphs is testable with one-sided error.

Selection Committee

• Lenore Cowen (Chair)
• Imre Bárány
• Richard A. Brualdi
• David S. Johnson
• Michael Molloy

Selection Committee

• Rolf Moehring (Chair)
• David S. Johnson
• Alex Pothen
• Carla Savage
• Doug B. West

Selection Committee

• William J. Cook (Chair)
• Fan Chung Graham
• Jerrold Griggs
• Laszlo Lovasz
• Peter Winkler

2000 Noga Alon

1996 Jeffry Ned Kahn and David Reimer

1992 Gil Kalai and Saharon Shelah

1987 Andrew Chi-Chih Yao

1983 Anders Bjorner and Paul Seymour

1979 Laszlo Lovasz

1975 Richard P. Stanley, Endre Szemeredi, and Richard M. Wilson

1971 Ronald L. Graham, Klaus Leeb, Bruce. L. Rothschild, Alfred W. Hales, and Robert I. Jewett