Richard K. Guy
Richard Kenneth Guy (born 30 September 1916 in Nuneaton, England)[1] is a British mathematician, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Calgary.
He is best known for co-authorship (with John Conway and Elwyn Berlekamp) of Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and authorship of Unsolved Problems in Number Theory (ISBN 0-387-94289-0), but he has also published over 100 papers and books covering combinatorial game theory, number theory and graph theory.
He is said to have developed the partially tongue-in-cheek "Strong Law of Small Numbers," which says there are not enough small integers available for the many tasks assigned to them — thus explaining many coincidences and patterns found among numerous cultures.
Additionally, around 1959, Guy discovered a unistable polyhedron having only 19 faces; no such construct with fewer faces was found until 2012. Guy also discovered the glider in Conway's Game of Life.
Guy is also a notable figure in the field of chess endgame studies. He composed around 200 studies, and was co-inventor of the Guy-Blandford-Roycroft code for classifying studies. He also served as the endgame study editor for the British Chess Magazine from 1948 to 1951.
Guy wrote four papers with Paul Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 1.[2] He also solved one of Erdős' problems.[3]
His son, Michael Guy, is also a computer scientist and mathematician.
Selected publications
Books
- Guy, Richard K. (2004). Unsolved problems in number theory (3rd ed.). New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-26677-0. ISBN 978-0-387-20860-2. MR 2076335.
Papers
- Richard K. Guy (2001). "Aviezri Fraenkel and Combinatorial Games" (PDF). Electronic Journal of Combinatorics 8 (2).
- Béla Bollobás, Richard K. Guy (1983). "Equitable and proportional coloring of trees". J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 34 (2): 177–186. doi:10.1016/0095-8956(83)90017-5.
- Richard K. Guy, Gerhard Ringel (1976). "Triangular embedding of Kn – K6". J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 21 (2): 140–145. doi:10.1016/0095-8956(76)90054-X.
Notes and references
- ↑ Author biography from Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, Vol. I, 2nd ed., AK Peters, 2001.
- ↑ Coauthors of Paul Erdos
- ↑ Brent Wittmeier, "Math genius left unclaimed sum," Edmonton Journal, September 28, 2010.
- Donald J. Albers & Gerald L. Alexanderson (2011) Fascinating Mathematical People: interviews and memoirs, "Richard K. Guy", pp 165–92, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-14829-8 .
External links
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