February 23, 2021
Assefaw Gebremedhin
Assefaw Gebremedhin, associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is recipient of the 2021 George Pólya Prize in Applied Combinatorics.
Administered by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the international prize is awarded every four years for a notable application in an area of mathematics called combinatorial theory. The field of research is primarily concerned with counting and has a broad range of applications in computer science and a wide variety of problems that it can address.
Gebremedhin and his colleagues, Fredrik Manne from the University of Bergen, Norway, and Alex Pothen from Purdue University, were chosen for their work to develop “efficient graph coloring algorithms and codes with applications to Jacobian and Hessian matrix computations,” according to the selection committee. Computation of Jacobian and Hessian matrices is central to many science and engineerin