Bernhard Korte

Bernhard Korte (1938 to 2025) was a German computer scientist and mathematician, a professor at the University of Bonn and an expert in combinatorial optimization. He earned his doctorate at Bonn in 1967 with a thesis on Hardy function classes supervised by Ernst Peschl and Walter Thimm, and his habilitation in 1971. After brief posts at Regensburg and Bielefeld he joined the University of Bonn in 1972, where he directed the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics. He held guest professorships at Stanford, Cornell, Waterloo, MIT, Yale and Rutgers among other places, and wrote Greedoids with Laszlo Lovasz and Rainer Schrader and the textbook Combinatorial Optimization: Theory and Algorithms with Jens Vygen. He received the State Prize of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Humboldt Prize and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.