The Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Umeå University (Sweden) is offering a postdoctoral scholarship within the project “Bounds for Pancake Sorting and Analysis of the Pancake Graph”. The scholarship is tax-free and amounts to 375 000 SEK/year for two years with starting date 1st September, 2025 or by agreement.

Project description:
The purpose of the project is to pursue research in pancake sorting, which is a well-known problem in combinatorial optimization which goes back up to a paper of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Papadimitriou from 1979. More concretely, we will study lower and upper bounds to both the unburnt and burnt version of this problem, and we will analyze the corresponding pancake graph. The specific research questions will be determined based on the candidate’s interests and expertise.

The postdoctoral scholarship is funded and administered by the Kempe Foundation (JCSMK-0158).

Research environment:
The project will be carried out in close collaboration with Associate Professor Gerod Jäger. Beyond this, the postdoctoral scholar will be encouraged to interact with other members of the Discrete Mathematics group, that currently consists of 23 individual researchers. The Discrete Mathematics research group is highly active; it holds a weekly seminar, hosts yearly workshops and receives a frequent flow of visitors and international collaborators. The group’s interests cover a wide range of areas including extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, combinatorial optimization, graph theory, game theory, algorithmics and geometry.

Beyond Discrete Mathematics, the Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics carries out research in computational mathematics, financial mathematics, mathematical modeling, analysis, machine learning, optimization, mathematical foundations of artificial intelligence, mathematical ecology and mathematical statistics.

Umeå provides outstanding working and living conditions. This youthful city is situated beside a large river, surrounded by forests and lakes, and is near the sea. The area offers numerous opportunities for both indoor and outdoor activities.

For more information and application instructions, please visit:
https://umustipendie.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:806306/