Daniela Kühn

Daniela Kühn (born 1973) is a German mathematician and the Mason Professor in Mathematics at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, England. She is known for her research in combinatorics, and particularly in extremal combinatorics and graph theory.

Biography Kühn earned the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Mathematics (Cambridge Mathematical Tripos) from Cambridge University in 1997 and a Diploma in Mathematics from the Chemnitz University of Technology in 1999, After working as a postdoctoral researcher at Hamburg and the Free University of Berlin, she moved to the University of Birmingham as a lecturer in 2004, and was awarded the Mason Professorship of Mathematics in 2010.

In 2011, Kühn and her co-authors published a proof of Sumner's conjecture, that "every n-vertex polytree forms a subgraph of every (2n − 2)-vertex tournament", for all but finitely many values of n. MathSciNet reviewer K. B. Reid wrote that their proof "is an important and welcome development in tournament theory".

Awards and honours In 2002, Kühn won the Richard Rado Prize, a biennial best dissertation award given by the Section for Discrete Mathematics of the German Mathematical Society. Together with Deryk Osthus and Alain Plagne, she was one of the first winners of the European Prize in Combinatorics in 2003. Together with Osthus, she was a recipient of the 2014 Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society for "their many results in extremal graph theory and related areas. Several of their papers resolve long-standing open problems in the area." She was an Invited Speaker at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians, in Seoul. and appointed as a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder in 2015. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2024.