EATCS Presburger Award for Tomasz Kociumaka

Tomasz Kociumaka (left) receiving the Presburger Award from EATCS President Professor Guiseppe Italiano (right). Photo: ICALP

Strings, that is, character sequences of any kind such as texts in any natural language, appear everywhere in our daily lives, and they constitute some of the biggest datasets generated by humanity. Tomasz Kociumaka, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, has now received this year’s “Presburger Award” from the “European Association for Theoretical Computer Science” (EATCS) for fundamental work on the efficient analysis and processing of such string sequences.

The official laudation states: “Tomasz Kociumaka has made breakthrough contributions to the field of string algorithms and data structures, solving long-standing open problems and developing near-linear time algorithms for a wide range of fundamental string problems, including pattern matching, repetitions, and compressed indexing. His work often unifies and generalizes earlier techniques, offering clean and powerful algorithmic solutions that have reshaped the understanding of core computational tasks on strings. Tomasz has advanced both the design of efficient algorithms and the underlying combinatorial insights needed to analyze them, producing results that have become central references in the area. His research has not only advanced the state of the art in text algorithms but also inspired new lines of inquiry, establishing him as a leader in the field.“

From 2022 to 2024, Tomasz Kociumaka was a postdoctoral researcher in the “Algorithms and Complexity” department of director Danupon Nanongkai at the MPI for Informatics. Since 2025, he has been leading the research group “String Algorithms and Data Compression” within the same department. He received the award at the “International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming“ (ICALP) on July 10 , which took place at Aarhus University in Denmark.

The Presburger Award, presented annually since 2010 by the EATCS, honors young scientists for outstanding contributions to theoretical computer science. It commemorates Mojżesz Presburger, who as a student in 1929 introduced the Presburger arithmetic named after him. This year, Tomasz Kociumaka and Sepehr Assadi (University of Waterloo) were awarded. The prize committee consisted of Tal Malkin (Columbia University, chair), Joël Ouaknine (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems), and Shiri Chechik (Tel Aviv University).

After Karl Bringmann in 2019, Tomasz Kociumaka is now the second member of MPI for Informatics to be honored with this award.

Further information:
EATCS Laudation: https://eatcs.org/index.php/component/content/article/1-news/3008-presburger-award-2025-laudatio
Personal website: https://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~tkociuma/
Group website: https://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/algorithms-complexity/research/string-algorithms-and-data-compression

Scientific contact:
Dr. Tomasz Kociumaka
Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Email: tkociuma@mpi-inf.mpg.de

Editor:
Philipp Zapf-Schramm
Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Tel.: +49 681 9325 5409
Email: pzs@mpi-inf.mpg.de