Pavol Hell is a Canadian

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, born in Czechoslovakia. He is a professor of computing science at

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a Public university, public research university in British Columbia, Canada. It maintains three campuses in Greater Vancouver, respectively located in Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, British Columbia, Surrey, and ...

. Hell started his mathematical studies at

Charles University Charles University (CUNI; , UK; ; ), or historically as the University of Prague (), is the largest university in the Czech Republic. It is one of the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, oldest universities in the world in conti ...

in Prague, and moved to Canada in August 1968 after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He obtained his MSc from

McMaster University McMaster University (McMaster or Mac) is a public research university in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The main McMaster campus is on of land near the residential neighbourhoods of Ainslie Wood, Ontario, Ainslie Wood and Westdale, Ontario, Westd ...

in Hamilton, under the joint supervision of Gert Sabidussi and Alex Rosa, and his PhD at the Universite de Montreal, with Gert Sabidussi. In his PhD research he pioneered, on the suggestion of Gert Sabidussi, the study of graph retracts. He describes his area of interest as "computational combinatorics", including

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

graph theory In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of ''graph (discrete mathematics), graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of ''Vertex (graph ...

and complexity of graph problems. His current focus is on nicely structured graph classes, and on the complexity of various versions of

graph homomorphism In the mathematics, mathematical field of graph theory, a graph homomorphism is a mapping between two graph (discrete mathematics), graphs that respects their structure. More concretely, it is a function between the vertex sets of two graphs tha ...

problems. Hell has written the book ''Graph and Homomorphisms'' with his long-term collaborator

Jaroslav Nešetřil Jaroslav Nešetřil (; born 13 March 1946) is a Czech mathematician. His research areas include combinatorics (structural combinatorics, Ramsey theory), graph theory (coloring problems, sparse structures), algebra (representation of structures, c ...

, and many highly cited papers, including "On the complexity of H-coloring" also with Nešetřil, "On the history of the minimum spanning tree problem", with Ron Graham, "On the completeness of a generalized matching problem" with David Kirkpatrick, and "List homomorphisms and circular arc graphs" with Tomas Feder and Jing Huang. He is a managing editor of the ''Journal of Graph Theory'', and was named a

fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific soci ...

(SIAM) in 2012.Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2012
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References

External links

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Journal of Graph Theory
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hell, Pavol Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Czechoslovak mathematicians Canadian mathematicians Canadian computer scientists Czechoslovak emigrants to Canada Graph theorists McMaster University alumni Université de Montréal alumni Academic staff of Simon Fraser University Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics