Paul D. Seymour (born 1950) is a British mathematician known for his work in discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. He (with others) was responsible for important progress on regular matroids and totally unimodular matrices, the four colour theorem, linkless embeddings, graph minors and structure, the perfect graph conjecture, the Hadwiger conjecture, claw-free graphs, χ-boundedness, and the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture. Many of his recent papers are available from his website. Seymour is currently the Albert Baldwin Dod Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. He won a Sloan Fellowship in 1983, and the Ostrowski Prize in 2003; and (sometimes with others) won the Fulkerson Prize in 1979, 1994, 2006 and 2009, and the Pólya Prize in 1983 and 2004. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo in 2008, one from the Technical University of Denmark in 2013, and one from the École normale supérieure de Lyon in 2022. He was an invited speaker in the 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians and a plenary speaker in the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2022.
Early life Seymour was born in Plymouth, England in 1950. Seymour was a student at Plymouth College, and then studied at Exeter College, Oxford, gaining a BA degree in 1971, MS degree in 1972, and D.Phil and MA in 1975. His doctoral dissertation, Matroids, Hypergraphs and the Max-Flow Min-Cut Theorem, was supervised by Aubrey William Ingleton.
Career From 1974 to 1976 he was a college research fellow at University College of Swansea. Then he returned to Oxford for 1976–1980 as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, with the year 1978–79 at University of Waterloo. He became an associate and then a full professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, between 1980 and 1983, where he began research with Neil Robertson, a fruitful collaboration that continued for many years. From 1983 until 1996, he was a senior scientist at Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), Morristown, New Jersey (now Telcordia Technologies). He was also an adjunct professor at Rutgers University from 1984 to 1987 and at the University of Waterloo from 1988 to 1993. He became professor at Princeton University in 1996. At Princeton he was given the Albert Baldwin Dod Professorship in 2016. He is Editor-in-Chief (jointly with Carsten Thomassen) for the Journal of Graph Theory, and an editor for Combinatorica and the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B.
Personal life Seymour's brother Leonard W. Seymour is Professor of gene therapy at Oxford University. In 1979, Seymour got married and had two children.
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