Daniela Kühn facts for kids

Daniela Kühn (born in 1973) is a mathematician from Germany. She is a special professor of mathematics at the University of Birmingham in England. She is famous for her work in combinatorics, which is a branch of mathematics. It deals with counting, arranging, and combining things. She also works on graph theory, which studies networks of points and lines.

About Daniela Kühn

Daniela Kühn studied mathematics at several universities. She earned a special certificate from Cambridge University in 1997. Then, she got a diploma from the Chemnitz University of Technology in 1999. She finished her highest degree, a doctorate, from the University of Hamburg in 2001. Her teacher was Reinhard Diestel.

After her studies, she worked as a researcher in Hamburg and Berlin. In 2004, she moved to the University of Birmingham. She started as a lecturer there. By 2010, she became a special professor of mathematics. This is called the Mason Professorship.

Her Research Work

Daniela Kühn's research focuses on combinatorics and graph theory. These areas of math help us understand how things can be connected or arranged.

In 2004, she wrote important papers with her teacher, Reinhard Diestel. They studied "cycle spaces" in very large graphs. These graphs can have an endless number of points and lines. Their work helped to explain how cycles and spanning trees work in these huge graphs. It showed that rules for small graphs can also apply to much bigger ones.

Later, in 2011, Daniela Kühn and her team proved a big idea called Sumner's conjecture. This idea is about how certain types of graphs fit inside other types of graphs. Their proof was a major step forward in this field of math. It helped solve a problem that mathematicians had been working on for a long time.

Awards and Honours

Daniela Kühn has received many awards for her important work.

• In 2002, she won the Richard Rado Prize. This award is given to the best new doctorate in discrete mathematics in Germany.
• In 2003, she was one of the first people to win the European Prize in Combinatorics. She shared this award with Deryk Osthus and Alain Plagne.
• In 2014, she and Deryk Osthus won the Whitehead Prize. This award is from the London Mathematical Society. They received it for their many discoveries in graph theory. Their work solved several old problems in this area.
• She was invited to speak at a big math meeting in Seoul in 2014. This meeting was the International Congress of Mathematicians.
• In 2015, she received a special award from the Royal Society. It is called the Wolfson Research Merit Award.
• In 2024, she was chosen to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. This is a very high honour for scientists.