Biography
Prof. Dr. Radu Curticapean holds the newly founded Chair of Algorithms and Complexity Theory and took up his position at the University of Regensburg on October 1, 2023. Curticapean received his doctorate from Saarland University in 2015. His dissertation on the complexity of counting problems entitled “Counting the simple, small and slow things” was honored by the Gesellschaft für Informatik and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. After graduating, and before joining University of Regensburg, Curticapean worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Institute for Computer Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, Hungary), as a research assistant at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing University of Berkeley (Berkeley, USA) and at the IT University of Copenhagen (Copenhagen, Denmark).
Curticapean investigates efficient algorithms, i.e., efficient solution methods for computational problems, some of which also arise in practice. Together with his colleagues at the Algorithms and Complexity Theory group, he develops efficient algorithms and, within the framework of complexity theory, also proves that such algorithms cannot exist for some problems. This provides fascinating and sometimes surprising insights into the limits of efficient computability. His work is supported by the ERC Starting Grant COUNTHOM, which studies algorithmic and mathematical properties of the number of homomorphisms between graphs.
