Pavol Hell is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, born in Czechoslovakia.
Hell started his mathematical studies at Charles University in Prague, and moved to Canada in August 1968 after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.
In his PhD research he pioneered, on the suggestion of Gert Sabidussi, the study of graph retracts.
Hell has written the book Graph and Homomorphisms [1] with his long-term collaborator Jaroslav Nešetřil, and many highly cited papers, including "On the complexity of H-coloring"[2] also with Nešetřil, "On the history of the minimum spanning tree problem",[3] with Ron Graham, "On the completeness of a generalized matching problem" [4] with David Kirkpatrick, and "List homomorphisms and circular arc graphs"[5] with Tomas Feder and Jing Huang.
He is a managing editor of the Journal of Graph Theory, and was named a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2012.