David Conlon (born 1982) is an Irish mathematician who is a Professor of Mathematics at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

. His research interests are in Hungarian-style

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many ...

, particularly

Ramsey theory Ramsey theory, named after the British mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, is a branch of the mathematical field of combinatorics that focuses on the appearance of order in a substructure given a structure of a known size. Problems in R ...

extremal graph theory Extremal graph theory is a branch of combinatorics, itself an area of mathematics, that lies at the intersection of extremal combinatorics and graph theory. In essence, extremal graph theory studies how global properties of a graph influence loca ...

combinatorial number theory In mathematics, arithmetic combinatorics is a field in the intersection of number theory, combinatorics, ergodic theory and harmonic analysis. Scope Arithmetic combinatorics is about combinatorial estimates associated with arithmetic operations (a ...

, and probabilistic methods in combinatorics. He proved the first superpolynomial improvement on the Erdős–Szekeres bound on diagonal

Ramsey number In combinatorics, Ramsey's theorem, in one of its graph-theoretic forms, states that one will find monochromatic cliques in any edge labelling (with colours) of a sufficiently large complete graph. To demonstrate the theorem for two colours (sa ...

s. He won the

European Prize in Combinatorics The European Prize in Combinatorics is a prize for research in combinatorics, a mathematical discipline, which is awarded biennially at Eurocomb, the European conference on combinatorics, graph theory, and applications.. The prize was first awarde ...

in 2011 for his work in Ramsey theory and for his progress on Sidorenko's conjecture, and the

Whitehead Prize The Whitehead Prize is awarded yearly by the London Mathematical Society to multiple mathematicians working in the United Kingdom who are at an early stage of their career. The prize is named in memory of homotopy theory pioneer J. H. C. Whitehe ...

in 2019.

Life

Conlon represented Ireland in the

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. It is widely regarded as the most prestigious mathematical competition in the wor ...

in 1998 and 1999. He was an undergraduate in

Trinity College Dublin Trinity College Dublin (), officially titled The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, and legally incorporated as Trinity College, the University of Dublin (TCD), is the sole constituent college of the Unive ...

, where he was elected a Scholar in 2001 and graduated in 2003. He earned a PhD from

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

in 2009. In 2019 he moved to California Institute of Technology, having been a fellow of

Wadham College, Oxford Wadham College ( ) is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. It is located in the centre of Oxford, at the intersection of Broad Street, Oxford, Broad Street and Parks Road ...

and Professor of Discrete Mathematics in the Mathematics Institute at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. Conlon has worked in

, and he proved the first superpolynomial improvement on the Erdős–Szekeres bound on diagonal

s. He won the

in 2011, for his work in Ramsey theory and for his progress on Sidorenko's conjecture that, for any

bipartite graph In the mathematics, mathematical field of graph theory, a bipartite graph (or bigraph) is a Graph (discrete mathematics), graph whose vertex (graph theory), vertices can be divided into two disjoint sets, disjoint and Independent set (graph theo ...

''H'', uniformly random graphons have the fewest subgraphs isomorphic to ''H'' when the edge density is fixed. He was awarded the

in 2019 "in recognition of his many contributions to combinatorics".

References

External links

*
Home page
at Caltech
Home page
at Oxford * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Conlon, David 1982 births Living people Alumni of Trinity College Dublin Alumni of the University of Cambridge California Institute of Technology faculty Combinatorialists International Mathematical Olympiad participants 21st-century Irish mathematicians Scholars of Trinity College Dublin Place of birth missing (living people)