Luke Postle joins the C&O department

On May 15, Luke Postle commenced an assistant professorship in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization.

Luke received his PhD in 2012 from the Department of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where his supervisor was Robin Thomas. He then held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Emory University. 

Luke's research interests are in structural and topological graph theory, graph colouring, and matroid theory. His PhD thesis, on five-list-colouring graphs on surfaces, formulated a theory of "hyperbolic" graphs embedded in surfaces. This theory unified, extended, and substantially improved several results by Carsten Thomassen and others on five-list colourings of graphs on surfaces. Luke received the Best PhD Thesis Award from the Department of Mathematics at Georgia Tech. He has also worked on infinite matroids, extending a classical result of Cunningham and Edmonds on matroid decomposition to infinite matroids.