Matthias Gehnen

E-mail:gehnen@cs.rwth-aachen.de
Office: Room 4105b, Erweiterungsbau E1 of the Computer Science Center (2353|105b)
Office hours: Usually Tuesday 12:00-13:00, check this calender to see whether it takes place
Phone: +49-241-80-21132

Currently, I am a doctoral resercher in the Theoretical Computer Science group.

Research

My main research interest in my PhD studies is within the field of online algorithms.
I mainly studied two variants that ly in between the classical offline and online settings:

Open Problems

There are two problems on which I spent a decent amount of time thinking about, but have not found a satisfying answer:

Teaching

This summer I organize a seminar on Online Algorithms.

In the past, I worked in various ways for the following courses:

In 2022 and 2023 I led the RWTH-team at the International Mathematics Competition. Furthermore, organized the Competitive Programming Contest at RWTH Aachen.

In particular, I am proud of our lab course Algorithmic Battle, which I have hosting in recent years.
Its unique teaching concept allows students to find out themselves what makes a problem hard in various settings, and furthermore lets participants experience the importance of rigorous testing when developing code. We got supported by funding from a Freiraum Grant by Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre and a grant within the ICON ENHANCE Call 2025 for further development of this lab and its concept.

Supervised Theses

The following thesis projects were completed already:

Preprints, Publications and Talks

In addition, you might have seen my talks at the Workshop on Recent Trends in Online Algorithms (ICALP 2023), the Dutch Day on Optimization 2023, the Seminar on Graphs and Optimization at LaBRI, or here in Aachen.

Personal Scholarships and Awards

Studies

Before starting in the Theory Group, I studied mathematics with minors in economics and computer science at RWTH Aachen University. I obtained my master's degree with honors in December 2020.