Paul Seymour (mathematician)

This article is about the mathematician. For other people with the same name, see Paul Seymour (disambiguation).

Paul Seymour
Residence	U.S.
Institutions	Princeton University

Paul D. Seymour (born July 26, 1950) is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University. His research interest is in discrete mathematics, especially combinatorics, graph theory, and optimization. He was responsible for pioneering breakthroughs on regular matroids and totally unimodular matrices, the four colour theorem, graph minors and structure, the strong perfect graph theorem, the Hadwiger conjecture, and claw-free graphs. He won the Fulkerson Prize in 1979, 1994, 2006 and 2009, the Pólya Prize in 1983 and 2004, and the Ostrowski Prize in 2004, among others.

Early life

Seymour was born in Plymouth, Devon, England. He was a day student at Plymouth College, and finished first nationwide in the University of Oxford entrance exam. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, and received several degrees: BA in 1971, MSc in 1972, MA in 1975, and D.Phil in 1975.

Career

He became full professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, in 1983. From 1983 until 1996, he was at Bell Labs, then Bellcore (Bell Communications Research) Morristown, New Jersey (now Telcordia Technologies). He became professor at Princeton University in 1996. He is Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Graph Theory.

Paul Seymour in 2007
(photo from MFO)

Personal life

He married Shelley MacDonald of Ottawa in 1979, and they have two children, Amy and Emily. His brother Leonard W Seymour is Professor of gene therapy at Oxford University.

See also

• Robertson–Seymour theorem

External links

• Paul Seymour, home page at Princeton