2025
Michelle Delcourt
Michelle Delcourt receives accolades, including the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship Award
2025
Michelle Delcourt receives accolades, including the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship Award
“Mathematics professor Michelle Delcourt first read about a famous mathematical problem, called Hadwiger’s conjecture, in high school. Although problems like these are what initially drew her to mathematics, she never thought she would make a serious contribution towards solving such a notorious and difficult problem, until she did.
Last year, Delcourt and her co-author Professor Luke Postle from the University of Waterloo developed an original proof, making substantial progress towards Hadwiger’s conjecture. This significantly advanced the understanding of a central question in her field of graph theory and was subsequently published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, one of the top peer-reviewed journals in all of mathematics. This accomplishment has resulted in several high-profile conference invitations and shaped the current direction of her research area of graph colouring. In part for this result, she was recently awarded a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship (external link) to support her research, a two-year fellowship that “recognizes and rewards outstanding early-career fellows who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study”.
Delcourt is elated about the opportunity to contribute. “Hadwiger’s is the problem in graph colouring, it is the one everyone wants to solve and the one that all the best minds in graph theory have made partial progress towards over the years. It is one that I never thought I would make substantial progress on, so I am very proud of that,” she says.”
Published by Toronto Metropolitan University.
