Rate My Professor Thomas Rothvoss

Thomas Rothvoss is the Craig McKibben and Sarah Merner Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Washington, Seattle, and also Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. His academic journey began with a Diploma from TU Dortmund in 2006, followed by a Master's thesis on "Algorithms for Virtual Private Networks," and culminated in a PhD from EPFL in 2009 with a thesis on "On the computational complexity of periodic scheduling," both under Friedrich Eisenbrand. Postdoctoral research followed at EPFL in 2010 and at MIT from 2011 to 2013, after which he joined the University of Washington.

Rothvoss's research focuses on the intersection between theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, particularly approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems, discrepancy theory, and geometric questions in high dimensions. Key contributions include breakthroughs in integer programming algorithms, Steiner tree approximations, and the extension complexity of polytopes. Selected publications are "Optimal Online Discrepancy Minimization" with Kulkarni and Reis (STOC 2024), "Polytopes with Bounded Integral Slack Matrices Have Sub-Exponential Extension Complexity" (IPCO 2024), "The Subspace Flatness Conjecture and Faster Integer Programming" with Reis (FOCS 2023; Best Paper Prize), "From approximate to exact integer programming" with Dadush and Eisenbrand (Math. Program. 2025; IPCO 2023 Best Paper), "Scheduling with Communication Delays via LP Hierarchies and Clustering" with Davies et al. (FOCS 2020), "Constructive discrepancy minimization for convex sets" (FOCS 2014), "The matching polytope has exponential extension complexity" (STOC 2014; Best Paper Prize), "Polynomiality for Bin Packing with a Constant Number of Item Types" with Goemans (SODA 2014; Best Paper), and "An Improved LP-based Approximation for Steiner Tree" with Byrka et al. (STOC 2010; Best Paper).

His achievements have been recognized with the 2023 Gödel Prize, 2023 FOCS and IPCO Best Paper Prizes, 2018 Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize, 2025 Trevisan Prize, multiple STOC and SODA Best Paper Awards (2010, 2014), Packard Foundation Fellowship (2016-2021), Sloan Research Fellowship (2015-2017), NSF CAREER Award (2017-2022), and Feodor Lynen Fellowship (2011-2012). Rothvoss has graduated several PhD students, including Victor Reis (2023), Yihao Zhang (2022), and Sami Davies (2021). He regularly teaches graduate courses such as "Networks and Combinatorial Optimization" and "Lattices," with publicly available lecture notes, and serves as an editor for the Journal of the ACM (since 2024) and previously for Theory of Computing (2019-2023). He has organized key events, including a Simons Institute program on Convex Geometry and Algorithms (2017) and an Oberwolfach Workshop on Combinatorial Optimization (2024).