Fulkerson Prize 2006

The Fulkerson Prize is given by the Mathematical Programming Society every three years to up to three papers in discrete mathematics. The winners of the 2006 prizes are the papers:

• Primes in P, Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena
• A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with nonnegative entries, Mark Jerrum, Alistair Sinclair and Eric Vigoda.
• Graph Minors. XX. Wagner's conjecture, Neil Robertson and Paul Seymour.

Note that Agrawal and his students have landed yet another prize for their paper after the Gödel Prize 2006 that was given to them at ICALP 2006. The third paper establishes, after work presented in twenty papers and spanning about 500 pages, the Robertson-Seymour Theorem, which has been hailed as a monumental result in graph theory and one of the deepest results in the whole of mathematics. The authors have a knack for settling long-standing conjectures in graph theory.

The winners of the Fields Medal and the Nevanlinna prize will be announced at ICM 2006 by the end of this month. I am very curious to see who will land the prizes, and whether Perelman will be awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincare conjecture.