Neil Robertson (mathematician)

Neil Robertson
Born	November 30, 1938 (1938-11-30) (age 78) Canada
Residence	United States, Canada
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	The Ohio State University
Alma mater	University of Waterloo, 1969
Doctoral advisor	William Tutte
Doctoral students	Paul A. Catlin
Known for	Robertson–Seymour theorem
Notable awards	Pólya Prize (SIAM) (2004, 2006)

George Neil Robertson (born November 30, 1938) is a mathematician working mainly in topological graph theory, currently a distinguished professor emeritus at the Ohio State University. He earned his B.Sc. from Brandon College in 1959, and his Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Waterloo under his doctoral advisor William Tutte.

In 1969, Robertson joined the faculty of The Ohio State University, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1972 and Professor in 1984. He was a consultant with Bell Communications Research from 1984 to 1996. He has held visiting faculty positions in many institutions, most extensively at Princeton University from 1996 to 2001, and at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 2002. He also holds an adjunct position at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia.

Robertson is known for his work in graph theory, and particularly for a long series of papers co-authored with Paul Seymour and published over a span of many years, in which they proved the Robertson–Seymour theorem (formerly Wagner's Conjecture). This states that families of graphs closed under the graph minor operation may be characterized by a finite set of forbidden minors. As part of this work, Robertson and Seymour also proved the graph structure theorem describing the graphs in these families.

Additional major results in Robertson's research include the following:

Robertson has won the Fulkerson Prize three times, in 1994 for his work on the Hadwiger conjecture, in 2006 for the Robertson–Seymour theorem, and in 2009 for his proof of the strong perfect graph theorem.

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