Mathematician Oleg Pikhurko wins an ERC Advanced Grant

Professor Oleg Pikhurko from the Mathematics Institute and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications, University of Warwick, UK was awarded his second ERC grant. This time it is the ERC Advanced Grant, endowed with €1.58m, which will support the 5-year project entitled ‘Finite and Descriptive Combinatorics’.

In this new research endeavour Oleg aims to expand the existing connections and build new bridges between various areas of mathematics, focusing on combinatorial-type structures (such as networks, binary codes, etc). In 2012 Oleg won the ERC Starting Grant ‘Extremal Combinatorics’, which dealt with various extremal problems for graphs and hypergraphs, as well as analytic limits of discrete structures

Oleg Pikhurko was born in Zhovkva, L’viv Region, Ukraine in 1973. He studied Mathematics at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, L’viv State University (now Ivan Franko National University of L’viv), was awarded the Lopatynskyi Scholarship (1990) and graduated with distinction in 1995. After a 1-year Advanced Study in Mathematics course at Cambridge University in the UK, Oleg continued his academic training at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics of Cambridge University and was awarded his Ph.D. Degree in Mathematics in 2000. He continued his postdoctoral research at Cambridge as Research Fellow at the St. John’s College (2000-2003) and then joined Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA) as assistant professor (2003-2008), and promoted to associate professor (2008-2012). In 2011 Oleg became Reader at University of Warwick in the UK, where he has been holding full professorship since 2013. Throughout his academic career Oleg won a number of scholarships and prizes, including J. T. Knight Prize in Mathematics, Cambridge University (1996), Senior Rouse Ball Studentship, Trinity College, Cambridge University (1999), DAAD scholarship (2000) and Humboldt fellowship for experienced researchers (2010-2013).

Oleg Pikhurko published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals and the book ‘Surveys in Combinatorics’ (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which he co-edited with A. Czumaj, A. Geogakopoulos, D. Kral’ and V. Lozin. Furthermore he authored poems, short stories, plays and novels (in Ukrainian, English, Russian and German) and was awarded Charles Grant Tenant Prize for a Light or Humorous Verse (Trinity College, Cambridge, 1996). Oleg also likes drawing and painting (you can see some of his works here).