Mechthild Stoer

Mechthild Maria Stoer is a German applied mathematician and operations researcher known for her work on the minimum cut problem and in network design. She is one of the namesakes of the Stoer–Wagner algorithm for minimum cuts, which she published with Frank Wagner in 1994.

Education and career Stoer was a master's student of Martin Grötschel at the University of Augsburg in Germany, receiving a diploma in 1987 with the thesis Dekompositionstechniken beim Travelling Salesman Problem. She continued working with Grötschel in Augsburg for a Ph.D.; her 1992 dissertation, Design of Survivable Networks, was also published by Springer-Verlag in the series Lecture Notes in Mathematics (vol. 1531, 1992). After completing her doctorate she worked for Telenor in Norway, focusing on the applications of combinatorial optimization in telecommunication.

Recognition Stoer's work on minimum cuts received the inaugural European Symposium on Algorithms Test-of-Time Award in 2015. The award citation states that "The algorithm continues to be taught because of its elegance and used because of its efficiency and ease of implementation."

Selected publications previously announced in 1994 at the European Symposium on Algorithms,