Bernhard Korte

Bernhard H. Korte, who lived from 3 November 1938 to 26 April 2025, was a German computer scientist, a professor at the University of Bonn and an expert in combinatorial optimization. He earned his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1967 with a thesis on Hardy function classes supervised by Ernst Peschl and Walter Thimm, completed his habilitation in 1971, briefly held posts at Regensburg and Bielefeld and joined Bonn in 1972, where he directed the Research Institute for Discrete Mathematics. He was a guest professor at Stanford, Cornell, Waterloo, MIT, Yale and Rutgers. With Jens Vygen he wrote Combinatorial Optimization: Theory and Algorithms, and with Laszlo Lovasz and Rainer Schrader the book Greedoids in 1991. He received the State Prize of Nordrhein-Westfalen in 1997 and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2002, won the Humboldt Prize and was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.