Reinhard Diestel (born 1959) is a German mathematician specializing in graph theory, including the interplay among graph minors, matroid theory, tree decomposition, and infinite graphs. He holds the chair of discrete mathematics at the University of Hamburg.

Education and career Diestel has a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in England, completed in 1986. His dissertation, Simplicial Decompositions and Universal Graphs, was supervised by Béla Bollobás.

He continued at Cambridge as a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge until 1990. In 1994, he took a professorship at the Chemnitz University of Technology, and in 1999 he was given his current chair at the University of Hamburg.

At Hamburg, his doctoral students have included Daniela Kühn and Maya Stein.

Books Diestel's books include: Graph Decompositions: A Study in Infinite Graph Theory (Oxford University Press, 1990) Graph Theory (Graduate Texts in Mathematics 173, Springer, 1997; 6th ed., 2024). Originally published in German as Graphentheorie (1996), and translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Tangles: A Structural Approach to Artificial Intelligence in the Empirical Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2024; )

References Summary of CV, from online edition of Graph Theory (3rd ed.), retrieved 2024-10-07.

Reviews of Graph Decompositions: Graham Brightwell (1992), Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, R. C. Entringer, Bojan Mohar,

Reviews of Graph Theory: Michael O. Albertson (1999), Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Robert A. Beezer (1999), SIAM Review, (1st ed.) R. C. Entringer, (German ed.), (1st ed.), (2nd German ed.) Ian Anderson (2001), The Mathematical Gazette, , (2nd ed.) Jozef Fiamčik, (2nd ed.), (3rd ed.) Persi Diaconis and Ronald Graham (2006), SIAM Review, (3rd ed.) Michael Berg (2006), MAA Reviews (3rd ed.) Gabriel Semanišin (2006), (3rd ed.) Lutz Volkmann, (3rd German ed.) Ferdinand Gliviak, (4th ed.) Florin Nicolae, (4th German ed.) V. Yegnanarayanan, (5th ed.)

External links Home page

Graph Theory home page including free online preview version