Kurt Mehlhorn (born 29 August 1949) is a German theoretical computer scientist. He has been a vice president of the Max Planck Society and is director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science.

He won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 1986, the Gay-Lussac-Humboldt-Prize in 1989, the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award in 1994, the Konrad Zuse Medal in 1995, the EATCS Award in 2010, and the Paris Kanellakis Award in 2010.

He was named a member of the European Academy of Engineering in 1994, a member of the Academia Europaea in 1995, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in 2001, a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2004, a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2014, and a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.

He has received honorary doctorates from the Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg in 2002 and the University of Waterloo in 2006.

He is the 2014 winner of the Erasmus Medal of the Academia Europaea.