Prof Alex Pothen wins George Pólya Prize in Applied Combinatorics

Congratulations Prof Alex Pothen!!

Alex Pothen, an Alum of the 1978 Batch of the five-year integrated MSc program in Chemistry at IITD, and a recipient of  the Distinguished Alumnus award in 2009, has been awarded the 2021 George Pólya Prize in Applied Combinatorics.

Prof Pothen, a Professor of computer science at Purdue University, specializes in combinatorial scientific computing, graph algorithms, high-performance computing and bioinformatics. He was nominated for his research paper “What Color is Your Jacobian? Graph Coloring for Computing Derivatives,” which appeared in SIAM Review in 2005. He is being honored with his co-authors, Assefaw Gebremedhin of Washington State University and Fredrik Manne of the University of Bergen in Norway.

Graph coloring is a mathematical technique to divide a collection of objects into few groups so that a scarce resource can be used optimally. An example might be to group courses to be taught in a semester into time periods so that classrooms can be used effectively. Pothen’s article describes efficient algorithms to solve several variant coloring problems and then applies them to compute Jacobian and Hessian matrices — matrices of derivatives that are key calculus concepts. These enable scientists to solve nonlinear problems that could be modeled as optimization problems or differential equations, including machine learning.

His work provides a unifying framework for developing graph models and algorithms for 10 variant derivative matrix estimation problems. This work is being used in more than 50 areas of science and engineering, from robots that assist patients with impaired mobility to the dynamics of star formation.

Source: https://www.cs.purdue.edu/news/articles/2021/pothen_p%C3%B3lya.html