Photo of Neil Olver

Associate Professor

Department of Mathematics

London School of Economics

N.Olver@lse.ac.uk

About me

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I have been awarded a VIDI grant, a TOP grant, and a VENI grant (now completed) by the NWO (the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research).

I previously held a faculty position at the Department of Econometrics & Operations Research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with a part-time position at CWI. Before this, I spent three years an Applied Mathematics Instructor at MIT, under the mentorship of Michel Goemans. I was a PhD student in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, advised by Bruce Shepherd and Adrian Vetta. My undergraduate education was at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

I work primarily in combinatorial optimization, with excursions into game theory and probability. See the research and publications sections of this homepage for more.

News

  • I recently co-organised the followup workshop to our Trimester Programme on Discrete Optimization at the Hausdorff Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.
  • Our paper “Nonuniform graph partitioning with just a little flex” (joint with Harald Räcke and Stefan Schmid) was accepted to STOC 2026.
  • Our paper “Stochastic Load Balancing with Machine Reservations” (joint with David Aleman Espinosa, Naveen Garg, Sharat Ibrahimpur and Chaitanya Swamy) was accepted to IPCO 2026.

Positions

Education

present2021
Associate Professor London School of Economics and Political Science
20102006
PhD (Applied Mathematics) McGill University
20212019
Assistant Professor London School of Economics and Political Science
20062004
MSc (Applied Mathematics) McGill University
20192018
Associate Professor Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & CWI
20042000
BSc (Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics) University of Cape Town
20182013
Assistant Professor Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & CWI
20132010
Instructor in Applied Mathematics MIT

Research funding

20252018
NWO VIDI grant Usable algorithms for network optimization
20202016
NWO TOP grant Dynamic traffic models
20162013
NWO VENI grant Robustness and connectivity in network design
20142011
NSF grant (co-PI with M. Goemans and R. Zenklusen) New approaches to fundamental problems in network design

Students

  • Yang Yang (2025 – )
  • Karl Stickler (2021 – 2023 – MPhil) → Amazon Luxembourg
  • Dario Frascaria (2016 – 2021) → Bayer
  • Madelon de Kemp (2016 – 2020); co-supervised with Michel MandjesABN AMRO
  • Thomas Bosman (2015 – 2019); co-supervised with Leen StougieBooking.com

Postdocs

Collaborators

Louigi Addario-Berry, David Alemán Espinosa, Omid Amini, Igor Barashenkov, Coulter Beeson, Sander Borst, Thomas Bosman, Richard Cole, Roberto Cominetti, José Correa, Daniel Dadush, Luc Devroye, Babak Farzad, Andreas Feldmann, Aleksander Figiel, Dario Frascaria, Naveen Garg, Vasilis Gkatzelis, Michel Goemans, Navin Goyal, Simon Griffiths, Cristóbal Guzmán, Nick Harvey, Sharat Ibrahimpur, Madelon de Kemp, Marcos Kiwi, Nathan Klein, Zhuan Khye Koh, Janne Korhonen, Jochen Könemann, André Linhares, Michel Mandjes, Vahab Mirrokni, Bento Natura, Kanstantsin Pashkovich, Kirk Pruhs, R. Ravi, Thomas Rothvoß, Harald Räcke, Laura Sanità, Frans Schalekamp, Kevin Schewior, Stefan Schmid, Leon Sering, Bruce Shepherd, Makrand Sinha, René Sitters, Suzanne van der Ster, Leen Stougie, Chaitanya Swamy, Laura Vargas Koch, Alberto Vera, Erik Verhoef, Adrian Vetta, Jens Vygen, László Végh, Zi Song Yeoh, Rico Zenklusen, Anke van Zuylen.