Stellenbosch University will honour one of South Africa and the world's foremost researchers in combinatorics, prof. Helmut Prodinger, with the Chancellor's Award for Research during the March 2016 graduation ceremony.
At the same ceremony prof. Prodinger will also receive a Doctor of Science (DSc) degree for his significant contribution to the analysis of approximate counting over several decades. Approximate counting is a classical technique in computer science to handle large quantities of data with limited capacities.
The Doctor of Science degree follows after a PhD and is awarded for published work of an exceptional standard, containing original contributions to the advancement of knowledge and learning which has given the candidate international distinction in their field.
Prof. Stephan Wagner, head of the Division: Mathematics at SU and his supervisor, says prof. Prodinger is one of the founding fathers of the modern analysis of algorithms and analytic combinatorics: "He has made fundamental contributions to virtually every aspect of this relatively young research area. His work on digital systems has been particularly influential."
Digital expansions of various kinds play a crucial role in different areas of computer science. Suitably chosen digital systems can, for example, be used to improve the performance of algorithms in elliptic curve cryptography.
Prof. Prodinger's work has also greatly improved understanding of the asymptotic properties of digital search trees by introducing novel techniques such as the Mellin transform to the subject: "His fundamental paper on applications of the Mellin transforms to digital sums has already been cited more than 100 times and is still the main reference in its field," prof. Wagner adds.
His colleagues describe him as an exceptional researcher who inspires with his unique approach based on a combination of intuition, computer experiments and clever use of calculations and analytic techniques.
He has published over 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals with over 60 co-authors worldwide. According to Google Scholar, he has 4064 citations and an h-index of 33, both of which are remarkably high in Mathematics.
He has also contributed greatly to the mathematical community by supervising 6 PhD-students in Austria and about 15 MSc students in Austria and South Africa. Throughout his career, Prof Prodinger has inspired collaborations with young researchers all over the world.
Since he moved to South Africa in 1998, prof. Prodinger has held an A-rating from the National Research Foundation (NRF). He has received numerous awards, including the Gold Medal of the South African Mathematical Society (SAMS) (2001); the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Research (2001) from the University of the Witwatersrand; and the SAMS Award for Research Distinction in 2003. Since 2005, he is also Honorary Professor at Graz University of Technology. He serves on various conference programme committees as well as the editorial boards of some of the leading journals in his field, such as Theoretical Computer Science.
