Kurt Mehlhorn

Awards and honors He won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 1986, the Gay-Lussac-Humboldt-Prize in 1989, the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award in 1994, the Konrad Zuse Medal in 1995, the EATCS Award in 2010, and the Paris Kanellakis Award in 2010. He was named a member of the Academia Europaea in 1995, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in 2001, a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2004, a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2014, and a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. He has received honorary doctorates from the Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg in 2002 and the University of Waterloo in 2006. He is the 2014 winner of the Erasmus Medal of the Academia Europaea. In 2025 he was awarded with the Saarland Order of Merit.

Research

Mehlhorn is the author of several books and over 250 scientific publications, which include fundamental contributions to data structures, computational geometry, computer algebra, parallel computing, VLSI design, computational complexity, combinatorial optimization, and graph algorithms.

Mehlhorn has been an important figure in the development of algorithm engineering and is one of the developers of LEDA, the Library 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 behind the establishment of a Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany, the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science (MPII). Mehlhorn was managing director of the institute and headed the department of algorithms and complexity. He was also a driving force in establishing the research center for computer science at Dagstuhl and an initiator of the European Symposium on Algorithms .

Mehlhorn has also contributed to the development of fair item allocation algorithms. In particular, he participated in proving the existence of envy-free up to any item allocations for three agents with additive valuations, which was considered an important open problem.

Books . Revised and translated as Data Structures and Algorithms, Springer-Verlag, 1984. . . . . .

Selected publications . . . .