Professor Daniela Kühn

Professor Daniela Kühn

School of Mathematics
Professor in Mathematics (Mason Chair)

Contact details

Address
School of Mathematics
Watson Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Daniela Kühn is the Mason Professor of Mathematics. Her research interests are Extremal and Probabilistic Combinatorics. She has received several research grants from EPSRC and from Europe, including an ERC Starting Grant, an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship and an ERC Advanced grant.

She was awarded the European Prize in Combinatorics in 2003, the Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society in 2014 and the Fulkerson Prize in 2021. 

Further recognition for her research includes an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014 and an invited lecture at the European Congress of Mathematics in 2021.

Personal webpage.

Qualifications

  • Habilitation in Mathematics, Hamburg, 2003
  • PhD in Mathematics, Hamburg, 2001
  • Diploma in Mathematics, Technical University of Chemnitz, 1998
  • Certificate of Advanced Studies in Mathematics, University of Cambridge, 1997

Biography

Daniela Kühn obtained the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1997 and a Diploma in Mathematics from the Technical University of Chemnitz in 1998. In 2001 she obtained a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Hamburg.

In 2002 she was awarded the Richard Rado prize for her PhD thesis by the German Mathematical Association and in 2003 she was awarded the European Prize in Combinatorics (jointly with D. Osthus).

She worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Hamburg and at the Free University Berlin before she started as a lecturer in Birmingham in 2004. In 2010 she was promoted to Mason Chair of Mathematics.

Postgraduate supervision

Daniela Kühn is interested in supervising PhD students in Combinatorics. If you are interested, please email her.

Research

Research Themes

  • Combinatorics, especially Extremal and Probabilistic Graph Theory

Research Activity

Her research interests lie in Graph Theory, Probabilistic Methods and Randomized Algorithms.

Her results include the following:

With Csaba, Lo, Osthus and Treglown, she proved the Hamilton decomposition and 1-factorization conjectures (for which they were awarded the Fulkerson prize in 2021);
With Glock, Lo and Osthus, she gave a combinatorial proof of the existence of designs, a problem which goes back to the 19th century (and they also proved the existence of F-designs for arbitrary F);
With Glock, Joos, Kim and Osthus, she resolved the Oberwolfach problem on decomposing complete graphs into cycle factors;
With Kang, Kelly, Methuku and Osthus, she proved the Erdős-Faber-Lovasz conjecture (on colouring linear hypergraphs).

Publications