Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize

The Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS)  and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of US$1500 each are presented at each (triennial) International Symposium of the MPS. Originally, the prizes were paid out of a memorial fund administered by the AMS that was established by friends of the late Delbert Ray Fulkerson to encourage mathematical excellence in the fields of research exemplified by his work. The prizes are now funded by an endowment administered by MPS.

Next award:  August 2009.

Tenth award, 2006 :  To Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena, "PRIMES is in P", Annals of Mathematics, Volume 160, issue 2, 2004, Pages 781--793; and to Mark Jerrum, Alistair Sinclair and Eric Vigoda, A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with nonnegative entries. J. ACM, Volume 51, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 671--697; and to Neil Robertson and Paul D. Seymour, Graph Minors. XX. Wagner's conjecture, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, Volume 92, Issue 2 , 2004, Pages 325--357.

Ninth award, 2003 : To J. F. Geelen, A. M. H. Gerards, and A. Kapoor, for "The Excluded Minors for GF(4)-Representable Matroids," Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B, 79 (2000), no. 2, 247--299; and to Bertrand Guenin for "A characterization of weakly bipartite graphs," Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B, 83 (2001), no. 1, 112--168; and to Satoru Iwata, Lisa Fleischer, and Satoru Fujishige for "A combinatorial strongly polynomial algorithm for minimizing submodular functions," Journal of the ACM, 48, July 2001, no. 4, 761--777; and to Alexander Schrijver for "A combinatorial algorithm minimizing submodular functions in strongly polynomial time," Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B, 80 (2000), no. 2, 346--355. 

Eighth award, 2000 : To Michel X. Goemans and David P. Williamson for "Improved approximation algorithms for the maximum cut and satisfiability probelsm using semi-definite programming", Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, 42 (1995), no. 6, pages 1115-1145; and to Michele Conforti, Gerard Cornuejols, and M. R. Rao for "Decomposition of balanced matrices", Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 77 (1999), no. 2, pages 292-406.

Seventh award, 1997 : To Jeong Han Kim for "The Ramsey Number R(3,t) Has Order of Magnitude t2/log t," which appeared in Random Structures and Algorithms, volume 7, issue 3, 1995, pages 173-207.

Sixth award, 1994: To Louis Billera for Homology of smooth splines: Generic triangulations and a conjecture of Strang, Transactions of the AMS, volume 310 (1988) pp. 325-340; to Gil Kalai for Upper bounds for the diameter and height of graphs of the convex polyhedra, Discrete and Computational Geometry, volume 8 (1992) pp. 363-372; and to Neil Robertson, Paul D. Seymour, and Robin Thomas for Hadwiger's conjecture for K6; free graphs, Combinatorica, volume 13 (1993) pp. 279-361.

Fifth award, 1991: To Martin Dyer, Alan Frieze, and Ravi Kannan for A random polynomial time algorithm for approximating the volume of convex bodies, Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, volume 38/1 (1991) pp. 1-17; to Alfred Lehman for The width-length inequality and degenerate projective planes, W. Cook and P. D. Seymour (eds.), Polyhedral Combinatorics, DIMACS Series in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, volume 1, (American Mathematical Society, 1990) pp. 101-105; and to Nikolai E. Mnev for The universality theorems on the classification problem of configuration varieties and convex polytope varieties, O. Ya. Viro (ed.), Topology and Geometry-Rohlin Seminar, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1346 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1988) pp. 527-544.

Fourth award, 1988: To Éva Tardos for A strongly polynomial minimum cost circulation algorithm, Combinatorica, volume 5 (1985), pp. 247-256; and to Narendra Karmarkar for A new polynomial-time algorithm for linear programming, Combinatorica, volume 4 (1984), pp. 373-395.

Third award, 1985: To Jozsef Beck, for Roth's estimate of the discrepancy of integer sequences is nearly sharp, Combinatorica 1 (4),319-325, (1981); and H. W. Lenstra, Jr., for Integer programming with a fixed number of variables, Mathematics of Operations Research 8 (4), 538-548, (1983); and Eugene M. Luks for Isomorphism of graphs of bounded valence can be tested in polynomial time, Journal of Computer and System Sciences 25 (1), 42-65, (1982).

Second award, 1982: To D.B. Judin and A.S. Nemirovskii, for Informational complexity and effective methods of solution for convex extremal problems, Ekonomika i Matematicheskie Metody 12 (1976), 357-369, and to L. G. Khachiyan for A polynomial algorithm in linear programming, Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Doklady 244 (1979), 1093-1096; to G. P. Egorychev, for The solution of van der Waerden's problem for permanents, Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Doklady 258 (1981), 1041-1044, and D.I. Falikman, for A proof of the van der Waerden conjecture on the permanent of a doubly stochastic matrix, Matematicheskie Zametki 29 (1981), 931-938; and to M. Grötschel, L. Lovasz and A. Schrijver, for The ellipsoid method and its consequences in combinatorial optimization, Combinatorica 1 (1981), 169-197.

First award, 1979: To Richard M. Karp, for On the computational complexity of combinatorial problems, Networks, volume 5 (1975), pp. 45-68; to Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, for Every planar map is four colorable, Part I: Discharging, Illinois Journal of Mathematics, volume 21 (1977), pp. 429-490; and to Paul D. Seymour, for The matroids with the max-flow min-cut property, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, volume 23 (1977), pp. 189-222.