E. T. Parker

E. T. Parker
Born	1926
Died	1991[1]
Nationality	American
Fields	Combinatorics
Institutions	University of Illinois
Alma mater	Ohio State University
Doctoral advisor	Marshall Hall, Jr.
Known for	Euler's conjecture

Ernest Tilden Parker (1926–1991) was a professor emeritus of The University of Illinois. He is notable for his breakthrough work along with R. C. Bose and S. S. Shrikhande in their disproof of the famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that there do not exist two mutually orthogonal latin squares of order 4n + 2 for every n.^[2] He was at that time employed in the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand, but he subsequently joined the mathematics faculty at The University of Illinois. In 1968, he and a Ph.D. student, K. B. Reid, disproved a conjecture on tournaments by Erdős and Moser.

Parker received his Ph.D. for work 'On Quadruply Transitive Groups' at The Ohio State University in 1957; his advisor was Marshall Hall, Jr..^[3][4]

Selected works

• Bose, R. C.; Shrikhande, S. S.; Parker, E. T. (1960), "Further results on the construction of mutually orthogonal Latin squares and the falsity of Euler's conjecture", Canadian Journal of Mathematics 12: 189–203, doi:10.4153/CJM-1960-016-5, MR 0122729.
• Reid, K. B.; Parker, E. T. (1970), "Disproof of a conjecture of Erdős and Moser on tournaments", Journal of Combinatorial Theory 9 (3): 225–238, doi:10.1016/S0021-9800(70)80061-8, MR 0274328.

References

1. Colbourn, C.J.; Dinitz, J.H. (2010). Handbook of Combinatorial Designs, Second Edition. CRC Press. p. 22. ISBN 9781439832349. Retrieved 2015-04-08.
2. Osmundsen, John A. (April 26, 1959), Major Mathematical Conjecture Propounded 177 Years Ago Is Disproved, New York Times. Scan of full article.
3. Ernest Tilden Parker at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
4. Marshall Hall, Jr. (1989), "Mathematical Biography", in Duren, Peter L.; Askey, Richard; Merzbach, Uta C., A Century of mathematics in America, American Mathematical Society, p. 371, ISBN 978-0-8218-0124-6.