We are happy to announce that Prof Christian Ikenmeyer joined the Department of Computer Science and the Warwick Mathematics Institute on October 1st 2022. In his research, he combines ideas and challenges from theoretical computer science, algorithmic algebra, algebraic complexity theory, algebraic geometry, representation theory, and algebraic combinatorics. We welcome him to the department!

We are delighted to announce that the paper "Dynamic Matching with Better-than-2 Approximation in Polylogarithmic Update Time", coauthored by Sayan Bhattacharya and Peter Kiss from the Theory and Foundations Research Division at Warwick, along with Thatchaphol Saranurak (University of Michigan) and David Wajc (Stanford University), has received the best paper award at SODA 2023.

Computing a maximum matching in a graph is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimisation. The paper considers this problem in a dynamic graph, which keeps changing over time via a sequence of edge insertions and deletions. It was a decade-old open question to decide whether one can beat the performance guarantee of the simple greedy algorithm for this problem (which gives 2 approximation), in a dynamic setting. The paper answers this question in the affirmative, and provides the first efficient dynamic algorithm which can maintain a better-than 2 approximation to the size of the maximum matching in the input graph.