Professor Martin Škoviera is the Scientist of the Year 2022
Prof. Martin Škoviera from the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics, and Informatics at CU was awarded the Slovak Scientist of the Year during the Scientist of the Year Award for using innovative mathematical methods and publishing ground-breaking results in the field of graph theory.
Prof. RNDr. Martin Škoviera, PhD., is a renowned Slovak mathematician and computer scientist who has earned a distinguished reputation through his work in the realm of discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, with a special focus on graph theory. He is one of the founding figures of the globally recognized Slovak School of Topological Graph Theory, alongside Professors Širáň and Nedel. Additionally, he initiated the Graph Embeddings and Maps on Surfaces (GEMS) conference series, which has brought together experts in algebraic and topological graph theory from all continents of the world every four years since 1994.
His recent research activities have focused on the area of deep, long open and interrelated graph theory hypotheses about cycles, flows and graph coverages (e.g., Fulkerson’s hypothesis, Berge’s hypothesis, Tutte’s 5-flow hypothesis, the double-coverage hypothesis for cycles, and others).
In 2021 and 2022, he and co-authors from the cutting-edge research team he leads, as well as other collaborators, published a series of ground-breaking scientific papers. These have been published in leading scientific journals in discrete mathematics and general mathematics journals or accepted for presentation at major computer science conferences.
- The first group of papers ( 1- 5) develops and applies an innovative method of approaching these conjectures based on a surprising combination of projective geometry and group flow theory. The contribution of these papers is, among other things, the unification and significant generalization of previous results on the Berge hypothesis and the refutation of several related hypotheses, which has directed further research in this area.
- The second group (6-10) consists of papers concerning various aspects of the above-mentioned hypotheses and, in particular, potential counterexamples to them – snark. Of particular note are papers 6-7 devoted to the morphology of snark, using a new method based on the analysis of 5-cycle clusters to classify them. In this way, all snarks up to 36 vertices (there are more than 64 million of them) can be divided into a small number of classes and the properties of each of them can be understood without the use of a computer, which was not possible before.
An outstanding accomplishment in theoretical computer science is the presentation of paper 4. at the prestigious STACS 2022 computer science conference in Marseille, known for its exceptional level of selectivity.