Ronald Lewis Graham (born October 31, 1935) is a
mathematician credited by the
American Mathematical Society
as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development
worldwide of
discrete
mathematics in recent years". He has done important work in
scheduling theory,
computational geometry,
Ramsey theory, and
quasi-randomness.
He is
currently the Chief Scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications
and Information Technology
(also known as Cal-(IT)2) and the Irwin
and Joan Jacobs Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at
the University of California, San
Diego
(UCSD).
He was
born in Taft,
California
.
In 1962,
he received his Ph.D. in
mathematics from the University of
California, Berkeley
.
His 1977 paper considered a problem in
Ramsey theory, and gave a "
large number" as an upper bound for its
solution. This number has since become well known as the largest
number ever used in a mathematical proof (is listed as such in the
Guinness Book of
Records), 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 scientist's Erdős number is the minimum
number of coauthored publications away from a publication with
Erdős. Graham's Erdős number is 1. He co-authored almost 30 papers
with Erdős, and was also a good friend. Erdős often stayed with
Graham, and allowed him to look after his mathematical papers and
even his income.
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...", and the
Carl
Allendoerfer prize which was established in 1976 for the same
reasons, however for a different magazine, the
Mathematics
Magazine.
Ronald Graham, his wife Fan Chung, and Paul Erdős, Japan 1986
He has published about 320 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, Ché,
Laura, Christy and a son, Marc—from an earlier marriage.
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