Prof. Kurt Mehlhorn

Prof. Mehlhorn was the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and continues to be a director at the institute. He was vice-president of the Max Planck Society from 2002 to 2008. Having graduated in 1971 from the Technical University of Munich, where he studied computer science and mathematics, he earned his Ph.D. in 1974 from Cornell University. He was chair of computer science department in Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. Since 1990 he has been director at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, also in Saarbrücken. He has been on the editorial boards of ten journals, a trustee of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, and a member of the board of governors of Jacobs University Bremen. He won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize(1986), the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award(1994), the Konrad Zuse Medal(1995), the EATCS-Award (2010), the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award (2010) and was named a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery(1999), a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences(2001), and a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina(2004). He has received honorary doctorates from the Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg in 2004, the University of Waterloo in 2006, and the University of Aarhus in 2008. Mehlhorn has over 250 scientific publications. He is best known as one of the developers of LEDA, the Library of Efficient Data types and Algorithms; he is also known for his work on shortest path algorithms, perfect hashing, parallel algorithms, and computational geometry.