Mathematician Ronald Graham Dies At 84 (ams.org) 14
The American Mathematical Society has announced the passing of Ronald Graham, "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years." He died July 6th at the age of 84. From the report: Graham published more than 350 papers and books with many collaborators, including more than 90 with his wife, Fan Chung, and more than 30 with Paul Erdos. In addition to writing articles with Paul Erdos, Graham had a room in his house reserved for Erdos's frequent visits, he administered the cash prizes that Erdos created for various problems, and he created the Erdos number, which is the collaboration distance between a mathematician and Erdo's. He also created Graham's number in a 1971 paper on Ramsey theory written with Bruce Rothschild, which was for a time the largest number used in a proof.
Graham received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962 under the direction of D.H. Lehmer. He worked at Bell Laboratories until 1999, starting as director of information sciences and ending his tenure there as chief scientist. Graham then joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego and later became chief scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a joint operation between the university and the University of California, Irvine. [...] Graham was an AMS member since 1961. For more information, see his "special page," these video interviews by the Simons Foundation, an audio interview about the mathematics of juggling, and his page at the MacTutor website. Graham's most recent appearance on Slashdot was in 2016, when a trio of researchers used a supercomputer to generate the largest math proof ever at 200 terabytes in size. The math problem was named the boolean Pythagorean Triples problem and was first proposed back in the 1980's by mathematician Ronald Graham.
Graham received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962 under the direction of D.H. Lehmer. He worked at Bell Laboratories until 1999, starting as director of information sciences and ending his tenure there as chief scientist. Graham then joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego and later became chief scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a joint operation between the university and the University of California, Irvine. [...] Graham was an AMS member since 1961. For more information, see his "special page," these video interviews by the Simons Foundation, an audio interview about the mathematics of juggling, and his page at the MacTutor website. Graham's most recent appearance on Slashdot was in 2016, when a trio of researchers used a supercomputer to generate the largest math proof ever at 200 terabytes in size. The math problem was named the boolean Pythagorean Triples problem and was first proposed back in the 1980's by mathematician Ronald Graham.
This is why I still read Slashdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
I always hear the news full of Celebrity A has died, Celebrity B has overdosed (and those celebrities have been famous for little more than just being famous).
Here, we have a chance at actually being notified of the passing of someone who's spent a lifetime learning and enlightening people to improve their understanding of the fundamentals of the workings of the world.
Minds like this are always a loss, yet their time amongst the living is something to celebrate.
A bientot, Ronald Graham, rest well!
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Nerd deaths occasionally make it to the MSM. Back in April, the death of John Conway from Covid-19 was widely reported. The Economist published an obituary when Dennis Ritchie died.
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You'll never see Paul Vixie's obituary, though. Many years ago, he wisely added a @hourly provisional restart of his heart and brain to his personal crontab.
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Had to laugh at that! :)
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True.. But I find the media reasonably fragmented on the "nerd death" count.
It was a momentary nostalgic feeling when I remembered the Slashdot of old, where you'd often find out about people you'd never really heard of when they passed, but the stories and links in the articles pointed to a wealth of work they'd done that often ended up fundamental of things you were studying, or areas you were working in, or had interests.
I knew of this chap by reading about Graham's Number (which was intriguing to me; m
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Yes, but Conway invented the Game of Life, which is the greatest discovery ever achieved in mathematics!
(Cue Conway turning in his grave...)
G64 Trivia (Score:4, Interesting)
If you plug Graham's Number, G64, into Ackermann's function as suggested by xkcd.com/207/ [xkcd.com], the output is approximately G65.
While G64 is enormous, it is smaller than BB(19) which is a noncomputable function. Busy Beaver Function [wikipedia.org].
G64 is the upper bound to a conjecture in Ramsy Theory [wikipedia.org]. The lower bound is 13.
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G64 is the upper bound to a conjecture in Ramsy Theory [wikipedia.org]. The lower bound is 13.
You must agree with the authors of that paper, that "clearly there's some room for improvement here".
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You must agree with the authors of that paper, that "clearly there's some room for improvement here".
At the time the paper was written, the lower bound was 7. So there has already been a bit of an improvement. The uncertainty has gone from G64-7 to G64-13.
Dead at 84? (Score:2)
And 84 is two times 42.
so what? (Score:2)
Did he ever have any k3wl apps? just another n00b /j