Standa Zivny

Standa Živný

Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Fellow and Tutor, Merton College

A short bio, a picture, and my CV.

standa.zivny@cs.ox.ac.uk

AI IN MATHS & TCS

AI is increasingly influencing research in mathematics and theoretical computer science. My colleague Leslie Ann Goldberg maintains a page on this topic with various useful links. While I'm still forming my own views on AI, I'm not interested in spending my time posing problems to AI and reporting its outputs. I much prefer working the old-fashioned way: thinking about problems myself, playing with examples and counterexamples by hand to develop intuition, and collaborating with humans. In many of my ongoing projects, my collaborators throw LLMs at our problems; I'm fine with this since we never agreed on a policy regarding AI use. For new projects, however, I would prefer that we restrict the use of AI to literature searches, at least for now.

RESEARCH

My research is in the broad areas of theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics. I'm particularly interested in algorithms, computational complexity, discrete optimisation, and homomorphism problems. Most of my work lies at the intersection of these areas, focusing on (the mathematics of) constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) in their many forms (approximation, counting, decision, optimisation, promise).

All my publications are available online. Here are some examples of problems I've worked on:

Feel free to get in touch if you are interested in doing an undergraduate project, a master's dissertation, or a PhD with me. I cannot take on interns (except, occasionally, Oxford undergraduates) and therefore generally do not respond to such requests. I'm happy to supervise highly motivated students with a strong background in theoretical computer science and/or (any branch of) mathematics in any area of algorithms, discrete mathematics, and computational complexity. If you are a student at Oxford, it would help to take my course Combinatorial Optimisation.

GRANTS

SERVICE

I served as the Acting Head of the Algorithms and Complexity Theory Theme (2025–2026), the Deputy Head of Department for Teaching (2023–2025), the Director of Teaching (2020–2023), a member of the departmental REF panel (2018–2021), and the organiser of the Algorithms and Complexity Theory Seminar (2016–2019).

Conference Programme Committees

Editorial Work

Organiser

Panel Member

SUPERVISION AND MENTORING

ECRs

PhDs

Undergraduate and Master's Students

Research Interns

College Lecturers

TEACHING

Courses

Classes, practicals, and tutorials

Trivia

My first name, used on papers and official documents, is Stanislav, but I go by Standa [ˈstʌn.da] (roughly STUN-da), a commonly used Czech variant/diminutive of Stanislav.

My last name, Živný [ˈʒɪv.niː] (roughly ZHIV-nee, with zh as in measure), is written as \v{Z}ivn\'{y} in LaTeX.

I grew up in Soběslav, a small town in South Bohemia, Czechia. I've lived in Czechia, Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA.

I enjoy teaching and do a lot of tutorial teaching. For this and family reasons, I keep travel to a minimum, but you are always welcome to visit me in Oxford (virtually, if preferred).