Our department is large and diverse, with roughly 70 professors and teaching assistants, and we cover many major fields of mathematics, such as complex analysis, global analysis, functional analysis, algebra, topology, numerical mathematics, graph theory, combinatorics, theoretical computer science, mechanics, financial mathematics, probability and statistics. We pride ourselves on being not just good mathematicians, but also friendly and accommodating to our students.
The department also organizes 11 weekly research seminars and a monthly colloquium.
The following are some of the professors in our department.
Andrej Bauer
He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and is a professor of computer science. His research spans constructive and computable mathematics, type theory, homotopy type theory, proof assistants and formalization of mathematics, and semantics of programming languages. He received an award for excellence in teaching and research at the University of Ljubljana. He has a keen interest in computer art and is a master of aikido.
Matej Brešar
He received the PhD degree from the University of Ljubljana and is the author of over 180 research papers and four books, mostly on non-commutative algebra and its applications. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of Communications in Algebra and Linear Algebra and its Applications and Mediterranean Journal of Mathematics, the receiver of the National Prize for Science, and a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Sergio Cabello Justo
He received his PhD at Utrecht University and was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in Slovenia. His main research interests are computational geometry and graph algorithms. He was a visiting professor at, among others, IST Austria and École Normale Supérieure. He is a member of the program committee of several major conferences on algorithms and of the editorial board of the Journal of Computational Geometry.
Barbara Drinovec Drnovšek
She obtained her PhD from the University of Ljubljana. Her research area is complex analysis, more precisely several complex variables. Recently she joined the research collaboration between complex analysts from Slovenia and differential geometers from Spain and as a result, new phenomena in minimal surface theory were developed.
Roman Drnovšek
He finished his PhD at the University of Ljubljana, and has been a professor at this institution ever since. He gives lectures on functional analysis, measure theory, probability, and statistics. In 2014, he was awarded the Golden Plaque of the University of Ljubljana for his scientific and teaching work. His research area is operator theory. He has published more than 50 original articles in international journals.
Franc Forstnerič
He obtained his PhD at the University of Washingon and had a tenured position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before returning to Ljubljana. He works in geometry and complex analysis. He has published 140 research papers and three monographs. He has received numerous awards, is a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and is the head of the ERC project Holomorphic Partial Differential Relations.
Vesna Iršič
She received her PhD at the University of Ljubljana and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Simon Fraser University. Her main research interests lie in graph theory. She has published around 25 papers covering various topics, including games on graphs, domination, colorings, and metric properties of graphs.
Urban Jezernik
He received his PhD from the University of Ljubljana and held postdoc positions in Bilbao and Budapest. His research focuses on various aspects of group theory. He was awarded the Reinhold Baer Prize for his PhD thesis and his work was listed among the Top 10 research achievements of the University of Ljubljana in 2021. He is the coordinator of the Mathematics bachelor's programme.
Sandi Klavžar
He obtained his PhD at the University of Ljubljana and works in discrete mathematics. He has published more than 380 papers, co-authored several books including Product Graphs and The Tower of Hanoi, and is an editor of Discrete Applied Mathematics. He teaches discrete mathematics courses and has supervised 20 PhD students. In 2007, he received the Slovenian national award for highest achievements in mathematics.
Marjeta Knez
She works in the field of numerical mathematics and computer aided geometric design. She finished her PhD at the University of Ljubljana and has published more than 50 papers. The main topics of her research are geometric interpolation and approximation of curves and surfaces, Pythagorean-hodograph curves, motion design construction, splines over triangulations and isogeometric analysis. She has supervised over 60 students.
Matjaž Konvalinka
He received his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was a postdoc at Vanderbilt University after that. He has published about 35 papers, mostly in algebraic and enumerative combinatorics. He received an award from the University of Ljubljana for excellent teaching and research, and the 2019 Robbins prize by the American Mathematical Society. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Annals of Combinatorics.
Aleksey Kostenko
He obtained his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Donetsk, Ukraine, and Habilitation at the University of Vienna, Austria. He had several postdoc positions (in Dublin and Vienna). His research fields are analysis and mathematical physics with emphasis on spectral theory of linear operators. He has published more than 50 research papers and has received several awards (in particular, the Austrian Mathematical Society Prize 2016).
Tomaž Košir
He obtained his PhD at the University of Calgary with a thesis in applied mathematics (at the intersection of partial differential equations, linear algebra and operator theory). Later his research interests have shifted towards algebra and algebraic geometry problems that are motivated by applications, and most recently also towards the theory of copulas and its applications in finance and engineering. He is a popular BSc and MSc thesis advisor.
Ganna Kudryavtseva
She received her PhD degree from the University of Kyiv and has worked in Slovenia since 2008. She is the author of over 40 research papers. Her research interests are in algebra and its applications, particularly in inverse semigroups and their generalizations, partial actions and duality theory. She was a plenary speakers at many international conferences in algebra and is an editor for the journal Semigroup Forum.
Primož Moravec
He received his PhD at the University of Ljubljana. His main research interests are in group theory, in which he has published around 40 papers. He received an award by the University of Ljubljana for excellent teaching and research and was honoured by the National Research Agency for his achievements. His PhD student, Urban Jezernik, received the Baer prize for his thesis.
Janez Mrčun
His received his PhD from the Utrecht University. His research interests include differential topology and geometry, and he mostly teaches courses in these areas. He is the coauthor of the book Introduction to Foliations and Lie Groupoids with Ieke Moerdijk published by Cambridge University Press. In 2010, the Republic of Slovenia awarded him with the Zois Certificate of Recognition for his research.
Petar Pavešić
He obtained his PhD at the State University of Milano. His main research interests are algebraic topology and topological robotics, and he also works in ring theory, category theory and homological algebra. He has supervised three doctoral students and has published about 45 research articles and several books. Recently, he spent a year as a visiting professor at Brigham Young University.
Mihael Perman
He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His research field is probability theory and its ramifications. After visiting positions at University of Southern California and Cambridge University and a stint as Director of the Insurance Supervision Agency in Slovenia, he has been teaching mathematics and conducting research at the University of Ljubljana.
Bor Plestenjak
He finished his PhD at the University of Ljubljana in 1999 and received an honourable mention at Householder Symposium XV in 2002. His main research field is numerical linear algebra, in particular multiparameter eigenvalue problems. He has published around 25 articles in international journals and a software package for multiparameter eigenvalue problems.
Primož Potočnik
He works in the field of symmetries of combinatorial objects. He obtained his PhD from University of Ljubljana and continued his postdoctoral education at Ottawa University, University of Auckland, and Northern Arizona University as a Fullbright fellow. He has written over 50 scientific papers, published a textbook on graph theory and combinatorics, and supervised two PhD students.
Matija Pretnar
He received his PhD from University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on semantics of programming languages, type systems, and mechanical formalization of logic, in particular on algebraic effect handlers. Currently he is an assistant professor and teaches programming and computer science courses. He is the coordinator for the Computer Science and Mathematics Master's Programme.
Dušan Repovš
He obtained his PhD at Florida State University. His research is mostly in topology and nonlinear analysis. He has published over 500 research papers and four research monographs. He has also given over 400 invited talks around the world. He is the recipient of the Prize of the Republic of Slovenia for Science and is an Ambassador of the Republic of Slovenia for Science. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Pavle Saksida
He finished his PhD at the University of Oxford. His field of research is the theory of Hamiltonian systems, more precisely, integrable systems, an important topic in non-linear mathematical physics. In his papers, he studies integrable ordinary and partial differential equations. He mostly teaches courses on differential equations and on differential geometry.
Alexander Simpson
He obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where he remained for 21 years and was appointed to a personal chair in 2011. In 2015, he moved to Ljubljana, where he is now a professor of computer science. His teaching and research interests lie in the foundations of computer science and mathematics. He has authored more than 50 research papers, and has served on numerous programme committees and editorial boards.
Daniel Smertnig
He obtained his PhD at the University of Graz in 2014, and had stops at Dartmouth College and the University of Waterloo as a postdoc before joining the University of Ljubljana. His research is mainly in noncommutative algebra and factorization theory, but he is also interested in weighted automata. In 2023 he received the prize of the Austrian Mathematical Society for his research.
Sašo Strle
He obtained his PhD from Brandeis University. He was awarded the Clay Institute Liftoff award and was a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University. His research is in low-dimensional topology (knots and surfaces in 3- and 4-manifolds), which combines many different geometric and algebraic methods. He has published about 15 papers and teaches courses in topology and analysis.
Peter Šemrl
He received his PhD at the University of Ljubljana. He has published around 150 papers, mostly in linear algebra and operator theory, and has supervised four PhD students. He is currently President of the International Linear Algebra Society, Editor-in-Chief of Linear Algebra and Its Applications, and member of editorial boards of two other journals specialized in matrix and operator theory.
Riste Škrekovski
He obtained his PhD degree in graph colorings under the supervision of Bojan Mohar at the University of Ljubljana. His main research interests are various topics in classical graph theory, but he is also interested in applied and interdisciplinary areas as chemical mathematics, complex networks, metaheuristics... He mostly discrete mathematics courses.
Ljupčo Todorovski
He received his PhD at the University of Ljubljana and was a post-doc fellow and visiting scholar at Stanford. Currently, he is a professor of computer science with a research focus on machine learning. His research interests are related to algorithms for learning equations from data and applications of machine learning to scientific discovery. He received an award for excellence in teaching and research at the University of Ljubljana.
Matija Vidmar
He received his PhD from the University of Warwick. His work is in the area of probability theory, with occasional applications to financial mathematics, and has published about two dozen papers. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics, where he teaches courses in probability theory, stochastic processes and financial mathematics.