Alexander Hulpke the chair of the Department of Mathematics at Colorado State University.  

His research focuses on building concrete algorithms to do calculations in groups, which are the formal mathematical setting for symmetries.  

Some practical applications of his work include solving Rubik’s cube-type puzzles and counting the number of possible Sudokus that are fundamentally different.  

Hulpke has been at CSU since 2001. He earned his Ph.D in mathematics from RWTH Aachen in Germany, and later went on to complete postdoctoral research at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K, and at Ohio State.  

Hulpke’s research has been published in Journal of Symbolic Computation, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra and Experimental Mathematics.