Alan Tucker

Alan Curtiss Tucker is an American mathematician. He is a professor of applied mathematics at Stony Brook University, and the author of a widely used textbook on combinatorics;^[1][2] he has also made research contributions to graph theory and coding theory.

Education and career

Tucker is the son of mathematician Albert W. Tucker.^[3] He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1965 and then went on to graduate studies at Stanford University, earning a master's degree in 1967 and a doctorate in 1969.^[4] His doctoral thesis, supervised by George Dantzig, concerned circular-arc graphs.^[5] He then joined the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook University in 1970, and has remained there for the rest of his career. Since 1989, he has been a S.U.N.Y. Distinguished Teaching Professor at Stony Brook. Since 2011, he has been editor in chief of the journal Applied Mathematics Letters.^[4]

Awards and honors

In 2009, Tucker was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.^[6] He became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society in 2013.^[7]

Selected publications

• Hu, T. C.; Tucker, A. C. (1971), "Optimal computer search trees and variable-length alphabetical codes", SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics 21: 514–532, doi:10.1137/0121057, MR 0304063.
• Tucker, Alan (1975), "Coloring a family of circular arcs", SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics 29 (3): 493–502, doi:10.1137/0129040, MR 0437378.
• Tucker, Alan (1980), Applied Combinatorics, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, ISBN 0-471-04766-X, MR 591461. 3rd ed., 1995, MR 1287611. 6th ed., 2012, ISBN 978-0-470-45838-9.

See also

• Hu-Tucker coding

References

1. Review of Applied Combinatorics together with three other combinatorics texts by Albert Nijenhuis (1988), American Mathematical Monthly 95 (4): 363–365, JSTOR 2323584.
2. Review of Applied Combinatorics (2nd ed.), Andy Liu (1988), SIAM Review 30 (2): 337–339, doi:10.1137/1030075.
3. AWTucker vignettes, linked from Alan C. Tucker's home page as "stories that my father A W Tucker told me", retrieved 2014-10-07.
4. Curriculum vitae, retrieved 2014-10-07.
5. Alan Curtiss Tucker at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
6. Three Faculty Named 2009 AAAS Fellows, Stony Brook University, January 26, 2010. Retrieved 2014-10-07.
7. List of inaugural fellows, American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2014-10-07.