Mechthild Stoer

Mechthild Maria Stoer is a German applied mathematician and operations researcher known for her work on the minimum cut problem and on the design of survivable communication networks. She studied at the University of Augsburg under Martin Grötschel, took a diploma in 1987 and completed a doctorate in 1992 with a dissertation titled Design of Survivable Networks, later published in the Lecture Notes in Mathematics series. She then worked for Telenor in Norway on applications of combinatorial optimization in telecommunications. With Frank Wagner she published a simple minimum cut algorithm in 1994, now called the Stoer-Wagner algorithm, which received the inaugural European Symposium on Algorithms Test-of-Time Award in 2015.