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Ronald Graham

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For the diplomat, see Sir Ronald Graham

Ronald Graham

Ronald Lewis Graham (born October 31, 1935) is a mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society with being "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years"[1]. He has done important work in scheduling theory, computational geometry, Ramsey theory, and quasi-randomness.

He holds the posts of Chief Scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology (also known as Cal-(IT)2), and Irwin and Joan Jacobs Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

He was born in Taft, California. In 1962, he got his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.

A 1977 paper of his discussed a problem in Ramsey theory, and gave a large number as an upper bound for its solution. This number has since become famous as the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof (and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as such), and is now known as Graham's number.

Graham popularized the concept of the Erdős number, named after the highly prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős (1913 - 1996). A mathematician's Erdős number is the minimum number of links away from Erdős they are, where mathematician A is linked to mathematician B if they have co-authored a paper. Graham's Erdős number is 1. Not only did he co-author a paper with Erdős, but he was also a good friend. Erdős often stayed with him, and let him look after his mathematical papers and even his money for him.

Between 1993 and 1994 Graham served as the president of the American Mathematical Society. Graham was also featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not for being not only "one of the world's foremost mathematicians", but also "a highly skilled trampolinist and juggler", and past president of the International Jugglers' Association.

In 2003, Graham won the American Mathematical Society's annual Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. The prize was awarded on January 16 that year, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1999 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Graham, prolific mathematician and industrious human being, has won many other prizes over the years; he was one of the laureates of the prestigious Pólya Prize the first year it was ever awarded, and among the first to win the Euler Medal. The Mathematical Association of America has also awarded him both the Lester R. Ford prize which was "...established in 1964 to recognize authors of articles of expository excellence published in The American Mathematical Monthly..."[2], and the Carl Allendoerfer prize which was established in 1976 for the same reasons, however for a different magazine, the Mathematics Magazine[3].

Ronald Graham, his wife Fan Chung and Paul Erdős, Japon 1986

As of 2003, he has published about 300 papers and five books, including Concrete Mathematics with Donald Knuth.

He is married to Fan Chung Graham (known professionally as Fan Chung), who is the Akamai Professor in Internet Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He has four children — three daughters, Che, Laura, Christy and a son, Marc — from an earlier marriage.

See also

References

  1. ^ AMS document about the 2003 Steele Prizes (PDF format)
  2. ^ MAA's Lester R. Ford Award Page
  3. ^ MAA's Carl B. Allendoerfer Award Page

The following were all used as references.

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