Francisco Santos Leal

{{Short description|Spanish mathematician}}

{{family name hatnote|Santos||lang=Spanish}}

Francisco (Paco) Santos Leal (born 28 May 1968) is a Spanish mathematician at the University of Cantabria, known for finding a counterexample to the Hirsch conjecture in polyhedral combinatorics.{{citation|last=Santos|first=Francisco

|title=A counterexample to the Hirsch conjecture

|journal=Annals of Mathematics | volume=176 | issue=1 | pages=383–412|doi=10.4007/annals.2012.176.1.7 |mr=2925387

|year=2011|arxiv=1006.2814|s2cid=15325169

}}{{citation|url=http://gaussianos.com/francisco-santos-encuentra-un-contraejemplo-que-refuta-la-conjetura-de-hirsch/|title=Francisco Santos encuentra un contraejemplo que refuta la conjetura de Hirsch|website=Gaussianos|date=May 24, 2010}}{{citation|url=http://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/francisco-santos-disproves-the-hirsch-conjecture/|title=Francisco Santos Disproves the Hirsch Conjecture|last=Kalai|first=Gil|authorlink=Gil Kalai|accessdate=2015-07-18|work=Combinatorics and more|date=10 May 2010}}. In 2015 he won the Fulkerson Prize for this research.[http://www.mathopt.org/?nav=fulkerson_2015 2015 Fulkerson Prize citation], retrieved 2015-07-18.

File:Santos francisco.jpg

Santos was born in Valladolid, Spain.[http://personales.unican.es/santosf/CVeng.pdf Curriculum vitae] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160416140851/http://personales.unican.es/santosf/CVeng.pdf |date=2016-04-16 }}, retrieved 2015-07-18. He earned a licenciate in mathematics from the University of Cantabria in 1991, and a master's degree in pure mathematics from Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France in the same year. He returned to Cantabria for his doctorate, which he finished in 1995, with a thesis on the combinatorial geometry of algebraic curves and Delaunay triangulations supervised by Tomás Recio.{{mathgenealogy|id=37099}} He also has a second licenciate, in physics, from Cantabria in 1996. After postdoctoral studies at the University of Oxford he returned to Cantabria as a faculty member in 1997, and was promoted to full professor in 2008. From 2009 to 2013 he has been vice-dean of the Faculty of Sciences at Cantabria.

As well as being honored by the Fulkerson Prize in 2015 for a counter-example of the Hirsch conjecture, he was an invited sectional speaker at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians.

Santos is an Editor-in-Chief of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.{{cite web | url = http://www.combinatorics.org/ojs/index.php/eljc/about/editorialTeam | title = Editorial Team, Electronic Journal of Combinatorics | access-date = 24 July 2015}}