The Richard Rado Prize has been awarded every two years since 1998 by the Discrete Mathematics Section of the German Mathematical Society for outstanding dissertations in discrete mathematics. The prize is endowed with 1000 Euro. The decision on the award is always in the hands of a renowned foreign mathematician, this year in the hands of Jesús A. De Loera from the University of Calfornia. In 2020, the prize was won by Lisa Sauermann, who also studied at the University of Bonn.
Richard Rado (1906-1989) was one of the most important discrete mathematicians of our century. His dissertation "Studies in Combinatorics," which he completed under the guidance of Issai Schur in Berlin in 1931, is a mathematical gem that has lost none of its scientific relevance to this day. In the course of his life he made fundamental contributions to order theory, matroid theory, graph theory and Ramsey theory, to name only a few subfields of discrete mathematics.
Vera Traub was recently appointed to the University of Bonn, as a junior professor at the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics, and is a member of the HCM. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher in Rico Zenklusen's group at ETH Zurich. Vera Traub completed her dissertation in 2020 under the supervision of Jens Vygen at the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics and received prestigious awards for it (the Hausdorff Memorial Prize, the EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award, and recently the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation). In her PhD thesis, Vera Traub made important breakthroughs on open questions of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Subsequently, she achieved fundamental advances in network design. The TSP and network design are among the most prominent problems in combinatorial optimization.