I am a tenure track assistant professor at Bowdoin College. Previously, I was a Hermann Weyl Instructor at ETH Zürich mentored by Robert Weismantel.
Before that, I got my PhD at UC Davis advised by Jesús De Loera. I study the interaction between algebraic and geometric combinatorics and optimization.
Much of my research has focused around the simplex method. See for example this Quanta magazine article
on recent work by my current collaborators Eleon Bach and Sophie Huiberts. We are currently working on various extensions of the results discussed there.
Email me at a.[last name]@bowdoin.edu or message me on LinkedIn
Publications
Short Circuit Walks in Fixed Dimension arXiv:2510.01916 Alexander E. Black, Christian Nöbel, and Raphael Steiner Accepted at SODA 2026
On the Circuit Diameter Conjecture for Counterexamples to the Hirsch Conjecture arXiv:2302.03977 Alexander E. Black, Steffen Borgwardt, and Matthias Brugger Discrete Optimization, 2025
Small Shadows of Lattice Polytopes Alexander E. Black SODA 2023
INFORMS 2022 George Nicholson Paper Competition Finalist
The Polyhedral Geometry of Pivot Rules and Monotone PathsarXiv:2201.05134 Alexander E. Black, Jesús De Loera, Niklas Lütjeharms,
and Raman Sanyal SIAM Journal on Applied Algebra and Geometry (SIAGA), 2023
Monotone Paths on Cross-polytopesarXiv:2102.01237 Alexander E. Black and Jesús De Loera Discrete and Computational Geometry, 2023
Fair Splittings by Independent Sets in Sparse GraphsarXiv:1809.03268 Alexander E. Black, Umur Cetin, Florian Frick, Alexander Pacun, and Linus Setiabrata Israel Journal of Mathematics, 2020
