Bernd Sturmfels

Bernd Sturmfels, born in 1962, is a mathematician and professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and, since 2017, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. He received his doctorate in 1987 from the University of Washington and the Technische Universität Darmstadt, spent two postdoctoral years in Minneapolis and Linz, taught at Cornell University and joined Berkeley in 1995. His contributions span algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, discrete geometry, Gröbner bases, toric varieties, tropical geometry, algebraic statistics and computational biology, and he has written highly cited papers in algebra with Dave Bayer. He co-authored Introduction to Tropical Geometry with Diane Maclagan. His honors include a Lester R. Ford Award in 1999, fellowship of the American Mathematical Society in 2012 and the George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics in 2018.