Peter Winkler

Peter Mann Winkler is a research mathematician, author of more than 125 research papers in mathematics^[1] and patent holder in a broad range of applications, ranging from cryptography to marine navigation.^[2] His research areas include discrete mathematics, theory of computation and probability theory. He is currently a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth College.^[3]

Peter Winkler studied mathematics at Harvard University and later received his PhD in 1975 from Yale University under the supervision of Angus McIntyre.^[4] He has also served as an assistant professor at Stanford, full professor and chair at Emory and as a mathematics research director at Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies.^[2] He was visiting professor at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.^[5]

He has published three books on mathematical puzzles: Mathematical Puzzles: A connoisseur's collection (A K Peters, 2004, ISBN 978-1-56881-201-4, translated to German and Russian), Mathematical Mind-Benders (A K Peters, 2007, ISBN 978-1-56881-336-3), and Mathematical Puzzles (A K Peters, 2021, ISBN 978-0-36720-693-2). And he is widely considered to be a pre eminent scholar in this domain. He was the Visiting Distinguished Chair for Public Dissemination of Mathematics at the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), gave topical talks at the Gathering 4 Gardner conferences, and wrote novel papers related to some of these puzzles.

Winkler's book Bridge at the Enigma Club^[6] was a runner up for the 2011 Master Point Press Book Of The Year award.^[7]

Also in 2011, Winkler received the David P. Robbins Prize of the Mathematical Association of America as coauthor of one of two papers^[8] in the American Mathematical Monthly.