Christoph Koutschan (born 12 December 1978 in Dillingen an der Donau, Germany) is a German mathematician and computer scientist He studied computer science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany from 1999 to 2005 and then moved to the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation RISC) in Linz, Austria, where he completed his Doctor of Philosophy in symbolic computation in 2009 under the supervision of Peter Paule.
He is currently with the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (RICAM) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Koutschan is working on computer algebra, particularly on holonomic functions, with applications to combinatorics, special functions, knot theory, and physics. Together with Doron Zeilberger and Manuel Kauers, Koutschan proved two famous open conjectures in combinatorics using large scale computer algebra calculations.
Both proofs appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The first concerned a conjecture formulated by Ira Gessel on the number of certain lattice walks restricted to the quarter plane. The second conjecture proven by Koutschan, Kauers, and Zeilberger was the so-called q-TSPP conjecture, a product formula for the orbit generating function of totally symmetric plane partitions, which was formulated by George Andrews and David Robbins in the early 1980s.
He is currently with the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (RICAM) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
