Bernd Sturmfels

He received his Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Washington and the Technische Universität Darmstadt. After two postdoctoral years at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation in Linz, Austria, he taught at Cornell University, before joining UC Berkeley in 1995. His Ph.D. students include Melody Chan, Jesús A. De Loera, and Rekha R. Thomas.

Bernd Sturmfels has made contributions to a variety of areas of mathematics, including algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, discrete geometry, Gröbner bases, toric varieties, tropical geometry, algebraic statistics, and computational biology. He has written several highly cited papers in algebra with Dave Bayer.

He is also the author or co-author of multiple books including:

• Computational synthetic geometry (with J. Bokowski, 1989)
• Oriented matroids (with A. Bjorner, M. Las Vergnas, N. White, and G. M. Ziegler, 1993; 2nd ed., 1999)
• Algorithms in invariant theory (1993; 2nd ed., 2008)
• Gröbner bases and convex polytopes (1996)
• Gröbner deformations of hypergeometric differential equations (with M. Saito and N. Takayama, 2000)
• Solving systems of polynomial equations (2002)
• Combinatorial commutative algebra (with E. Miller, 2005)
• Lectures on algebraic statistics (with M. Drton and S. Sullivant, 2009)
• Combinatorial algebraic geometry (with Conca, Di Rocca, Draisma, Huh, and Viviani, 2013)
• Introduction to tropical geometry (with D. Maclagan, 2015)

Sturmfels' honors include a National Young Investigator Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship. In 1999 he received a Lester R. Ford Award for his expository article Polynomial equations and convex polytopes.[1] He was awarded a Miller Research Professorship at the University of California Berkeley for 2000–2001. In 2018 he was awarded the George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics.

In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[2]

• Eisenbud, David; Grayson, Daniel; Stillman, Michael; Sturmfels, Bernd (2002). Computations in algebraic geometry with Macaulay 2. Algorithms and Computation in Mathematics. 8. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-04851-1. ISBN 3-540-42230-7. MR 1949544.
• Miller, Ezra; Sturmfels, Bernd (2005). Combinatorial Commutative Algebra. Graduate Texts in Mathematics. 227. New York City: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-22356-8.

• Gallian, Joe; Ivars Peterson (January 2008). ""Mathematicians Have a Different Perspective": An Interview with Bernd Sturmfels" (PDF). MAA FOCUS. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America. 28 (1): 4–7. ISSN 0731-2040. Retrieved 2013-09-15.

• Homepage at Berkeley
• Bernd Sturmfels at the Mathematics Genealogy Project