32 Facts About Ronald Graham

Ronald Lewis Graham was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years".

Ronald Graham was president of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and his honors included the Leroy P Steele Prize for lifetime achievement and election to the National Academy of Sciences.

Ronald Graham did important work in scheduling theory, computational geometry, Ramsey theory, and quasi-randomness, and many topics in mathematics are named after him.

Ronald Graham published six books and about 400 papers, and had nearly 200 co-authors, including many collaborative works with his wife Fan Chung and with Paul Erdos.

Ronald Graham served as president of the International Jugglers' Association.

Ronald Graham was born in Taft, California, on October 31,1935; his father was an oil field worker and later merchant marine.

Ronald Graham grew up moving frequently between California and Georgia, skipping several grades of school in these moves, and never staying at any one school longer than a year.

Ronald Graham enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1955, when he reached the age of eligibility, left Berkeley without a degree, and was stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he finally completed a bachelor's degree in physics in 1959 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Ronald Graham's dissertation, supervised by Lehmer, was On Finite Sums of Rational Numbers.

Ronald Graham was chagrined to be beaten in ping-pong by Erdos, then already middle-aged; he returned to New Jersey determined to improve his game, and eventually became Bell Labs champion and won a state title in the game.

Ronald Graham later popularized the concept of the Erdos number, a measure of distance from Erdos in the collaboration network of mathematicians; his many works with Erdos include two books of open problems and Erdos's final posthumous paper.

Ronald Graham divorced in the 1970s; in 1983 he married his Bell Labs colleague and frequent coauthor Fan Chung.

Ronald Graham became Chief Scientist of the Labs in 1995.

Ronald Graham died of bronchiectasis on July 6,2020, aged 84, in La Jolla, California.

Ronald Graham made important contributions in multiple areas of mathematics and theoretical computer science.

Ronald Graham published about 400 papers, a quarter of those with Chung, and six books, including Concrete Mathematics with Donald Knuth and Oren Patashnik.

Ronald Graham was the doctoral advisor of nine students, one each at the City University of New York and Rutgers University while he was at Bell Labs, and seven at UC San Diego.

Ronald Graham began the study of primefree sequences, the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, the biggest little polygon, and square packing in a square.

Ronald Graham gave a large number as an upper bound for an instance of this theorem, now known as Ronald Graham's number, which was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest number ever used in a mathematical proof, although it has since then been surpassed by even larger numbers such as TREE.

Ronald Graham offered a monetary prize for solving the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, another problem in Ramsey theory; the prize was claimed in 2016.

Ronald Graham's pebbling conjecture, appearing in a 1989 paper by Chung, is an open problem on the pebbling number of Cartesian products of graphs.

Ronald Graham scan is a widely used and practical algorithm for convex hulls of two-dimensional point sets, based on sorting the points and then inserting them into the hull in sorted order.

Surprisingly, as Ronald Graham observed, the answer is not always a regular polygon.

In nonparametric statistics, a 1977 paper by Persi Diaconis and Ronald Graham studied the statistical properties of Spearman's footrule, a measure of rank correlation that compares two permutations by summing, over each item, the distance between the positions of the item in the two permutations.

Ronald Graham became a capable juggler beginning at age 15, and was practiced in juggling up to six balls.

In 2003, Graham won the American Mathematical Society's annual Leroy P Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Ronald Graham was one of five inaugural winners of the George Polya Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, sharing it with fellow Ramsey theorists Klaus Leeb, Bruce Rothschild, Alfred Hales, and Robert I Jewett.

Ronald Graham was one of two inaugural winners of the Euler Medal of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications, the other being Claude Berge.

Ronald Graham was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985.

Ronald Graham became a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2009; the fellow award cited his "contributions to discrete mathematics and its applications".

Ronald Graham was an invited speaker at the 1982 International Congress of Mathematicians, speaking on "Recent developments in Ramsey theory".

Ronald Graham was twice Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecturer, in 2001 and 2015.