University of Bonn appoints László Végh as new Hertz Professor, financed from Excellence funding

The University of Bonn is once again welcoming a top-notch reinforcement in the shape of mathematician Professor László Végh. He has been appointed to a Hertz Chair, which connects up different disciplines at the University of Excellence in a unique way. Professor Végh will be based in the Transdisciplinary Research Area “Modelling”, where he will help to strengthen the links between different departments in the fields of algorithms and optimization problems in particular.

Whether it is about finding the optimum solution for resource allocation, medical simulations or training neural networks, digital applications are necessitating increasingly complex calculation methods based on mathematical principles. And it is these kinds of optimization problem that Professor László Végh will be studying at the newly established Hertz Chair for Mathematics, Modelling and Simulation of Complex Systems. “The University of Bonn enjoys an exceptional reputation in mathematics,” says Professor Végh, who is looking forward to his new responsibilities. “But there are also some outstanding groups here working in related fields, such as mathematical economics.”

The Hertz Chair comes under the Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) “Modelling”. “The TRA Modelling has members from many different departments and teams. My main aim is to bridge the gap between mathematics, computer science and economics—focusing specifically on algorithms and optimization—and to foster collaboration between the various groups.”

Discrete optimization problems are about finding the best option from among a finite but very large number of possibilities. “Although you can’t hope to find an optimum solution to your problem, you can identify a solution that’s guaranteed not to be far off that optimal state,” Végh explains. One of the best-known optimization problems is the traveling salesperson problem, which involves finding the shortest possible route for a traveler to visit multiple cities one after the other without passing the same one twice. “As well as routing problems for vehicles, this particular problem is also relevant to areas that seem unconnected to it, such as chip design,” László Végh says. “And the Research Institute of Discrete Mathematics at the University of Bonn has some major longstanding industry partnerships in place in this field.”

At the University, he is currently focusing on coming up with new approaches to general mathematical optimization models such as network flows, convex programs and linear complementarity problems. The latter is a general model that also encompasses questions of calculating equilibrium in games and markets. “I’ve also been looking at questions of optimization posed by problems of fair distribution and the allocation of resources as well as at how machine-learning methods can be applied to the design of mechanisms.”

Profile of the new Hertz Professor

László Végh studied mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, where he also completed his doctorate on connectivity augmentation algorithms in 2010. He went on to work as a research fellow at his alma mater and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and as a postdoc at Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. He has been a faculty member at the London School of Economics and Political Science since 2012 and was appointed a full professor in its Department of Mathematics in 2020. László Végh has held the Hertz Chair for Mathematics, Modelling and Simulation of Complex Systems at the University of Bonn since August 2024.

Hertz Chairs at the University of Bonn

Named after University of Bonn physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894), Hertz Chairs are held by researchers of international renown who are leading lights in their field and who burnish the profile of the University’s Transdisciplinary Research Areas. These professors are based centrally within the University and given the freedom to establish new areas of research, forge links between disciplines and inject significant fresh momentum where they see fit.

Interview with Professor László Végh
https://www.uni-bonn.de/en/news/hunting-the-optimum-solution