Kurt Mehlhorn
Born	(1949-08-29)29 August 1949 (age 75)[2] Ingolstadt,West Germany[2]
Alma mater	Cornell University[2]
Known for	LEDA
Awards	Leibniz Prize Konrad Zuse Medal (1995) EATCS Award Paris Kanellakis Award (2010)
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Universität des Saarlandes
Doctoral advisor	Robert Lee Constable[1]

Kurt Mehlhorn (born 29 August 1949) is a Germantheoretical computer scientist. He has been a vice president of theMax Planck Society and is director of theMax Planck Institute for Computer Science.

Mehlhorn graduated in 1971 from theTechnical University of Munich, where he studied computer science and mathematics, and earned his Ph.D. in 1974 fromCornell University under the supervision ofRobert Constable. Since 1975 he has been on the faculty ofSaarland University inSaarbrücken, Germany, where he was chair of the computer science department from 1976 to 1978 and again from 1987 to 1989. Since 1990 has been the director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, also in Saarbrücken. He has been on the editorial boards of ten journals, a trustee of theInternational Computer Science Institute inBerkeley, California, and a member of the board of governors ofJacobs University Bremen. He also served on the Engineering and Computer Science jury for theInfosys Prize from 2009 to 2011.^[3]

He won theGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 1986, theGay-Lussac-Humboldt-Prize in 1989, the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award in 1994, theKonrad Zuse Medal in 1995, theEATCS Award in 2010,^[4] and theParis Kanellakis Award in 2010. He was named a member of theAcademia Europaea in 1995,Fellow of theAssociation for Computing Machinery in 1999, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in 2001, a member of theGerman Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2004, a foreign member of theNational Academy of Engineering in 2014, and a foreign member of theNational Academy of Sciences in 2014.^[5] He has received honorary doctorates from theOtto von Guericke University of Magdeburg in 2002 and theUniversity of Waterloo in 2006.^[2][1][6] He is the 2014 winner of the Erasmus Medal of theAcademia Europaea.^[7]

Mehlhorn is the author of several books and over 250 scientific publications,^[8] which include fundamental contributions todata structures,computational geometry,computer algebra,parallel computing,VLSI design,computational complexity,combinatorial optimization, andgraph algorithms.^[4]

Mehlhorn has been an important figure in the development ofalgorithm engineering and is one of the developers ofLEDA, theLibrary of Efficient Data types and Algorithms.

Mehlhorn has played an important role in the establishment of several research centres for computer science in Germany. He was the driving force^[4] behind the establishment of aMax Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany, theMax Planck Institute for Computer Science (MPII). Mehlhorn was managing director of the institute and headed the department of algorithms and complexity. He also initiated^[4] the research center for computer science atDagstuhl and theEuropean Symposium on Algorithms.

• Mehlhorn, Kurt (1977),Effiziente Algorithmen, Stuttgart: Teubner. Revised and translated asData Structures and Algorithms, Springer-Verlag, 1984.
• Mehlhorn, Kurt (1984),Data Structures and Algorithms II: Graph Algorithms and NP-completeness, Springer-Verlag.
• Mehlhorn, Kurt (1984),Data Structures and Algorithms III: Multidimensional Searching and Computational Geometry, Springer-Verlag.
• Loeckx, Jacques; Mehlhorn, Kurt; Wilhelm, Reinhard (1988),Foundations of Programming Languages, J. Wiley,ISBN 978-0-471-92139-4.
• Mehlhorn, Kurt; Näher, Stefan (1999),LEDA: A Platform for Combinatorial and Geometric Computing, Cambridge University Press,ISBN 978-0-521-56329-1.
• Mehlhorn, Kurt;Sanders, Peter (2008),Algorithms and Data Structures: The Basic Toolbox, Springer,ISBN 978-3-540-77977-3.

• Mehlhorn, Kurt; Schmidt, Erik M. (1982),"Las Vegas is better than determinism in VLSI and distributed computing"(PDF),Proc. 14th ACM Symp. Theory of Computing (STOC), pp. 330–337,doi:10.1145/800070.802208,ISBN 978-0897910705,S2CID 17932779.
• Mehlhorn, Kurt;Vishkin, Uzi (November 1984),"Randomized and deterministic simulations of PRAMs by parallel machines with restricted granularity of parallel memories"(PDF),Acta Informatica,21 (4):339–374,doi:10.1007/BF00264615,S2CID 29789494.
• Alt, Helmut; Mehlhorn, Kurt; Wagener, Hubert;Welzl, Emo (1988),"Congruence, similarity, and symmetries of geometric objects"(PDF),Discrete and Computational Geometry,3 (1):237–256,doi:10.1007/BF02187910,S2CID 5855400.
• Ahuja, Ravindra K.; Mehlhorn, Kurt;Orlin, James B.;Tarjan, Robert E. (April 1990),"Faster algorithms for the shortest path problem"(PDF),Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery,37 (2):213–223,CiteSeerX 10.1.1.85.5847,doi:10.1145/77600.77615,hdl:1721.1/47994,S2CID 5499589.
• Dietzfelbinger, Martin;Karlin, Anna; Mehlhorn, Kurt; Meyer auf der Heide, Friedhelm; Rohnert, Hans;Tarjan, Robert E. (1994),"Dynamic perfect hashing: upper and lower bounds",SIAM Journal on Computing,23 (4):738–761,CiteSeerX 10.1.1.30.8165,doi:10.1137/S0097539791194094. Also available asPrinceton TR-310-91.

• 1949 births
• Living people
• German computer scientists
• Researchers in geometric algorithms
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize winners
• Academic staff of Saarland University
• Max Planck Institute for Informatics
• Technical University of Munich alumni
• Cornell University alumni
• Members of Academia Europaea
• 1999 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
• Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
• Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
• Max Planck Society people

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• Short description matches Wikidata
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