Professor Parinya Chalermsook Inaugural Lecture

Mathematics and Computation: A Journey through Their Intimate Connections

Mathematics and computation have always shared a close relationship: insights in one often spark breakthroughs in the other. In this inaugural lecture, I will take the audience on a journey through this connection, showing how my own research has been shaped by viewing problems through both lenses. Many of the questions I study can be seen as mathematical puzzles on the one hand and computational challenges on the other. Exploring these perspectives side by side has not only helped to make progress on long-standing problems, but also revealed unexpected links between seemingly distant questions. Along the way, I will share stories of these discoveries and reflect on what they reveal about the creative process in science – how progress often emerges from shifting perspectives, drawing connections across disciplines, and looking at old questions in new ways

Parinya earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2012. From 2013 to 2016, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, followed by eight years at Aalto University in Finland, where he served as an assistant professor and later as an associate professor. In 2025, he joined the University of Sheffield as a Professor of Algorithms.

Parinya's research explores the intersection of algorithms, combinatorics, and optimization. He has received several early-career awards for his research, including an ERC Starting Grant (2018), a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship (2017), and an Academy of Finland Research Fellowship (2017). To date, he has supervised six PhD graduates and hosted five postdoctoral researchers.