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Obituary: Ronald Lewis Graham

By Jeffrey C. Lagarias

Ronald Lewis Graham, 1935-2020. Photo courtesy of Ché Graham.
Ron Graham, an eminent mathematician known for his wide-ranging contributions to many fields, passed away on July 6, 2020. He was the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Endowed Chair of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Ron was born in Taft, Calif., in 1935 as the eldest of three children. His family moved frequently—relocating from Georgia to Florida and back to California—and he attended many schools and skipped several grades. At age 15, Ron left high school to attend the University of Chicago on a three-year Ford Foundation scholarship. He then transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he first encountered number theory in a course taught by Derrick H. Lehmer. In response to the draft, Ron enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Alaska. He was a student at the University of Alaska by day and a communications specialist at night, completing an undergraduate degree in physics in 1958. After leaving the Air Force, Ron returned to Berkeley and obtained a master’s degree. In 1962, he earned his Ph.D. in number theory, advised by Lehmer, and joined AT&T Bell Laboratories (as it was then called) as a Member of Technical Staff.

Ron rose through the ranks of Bell Labs management, serving as head of the Discrete Mathematics Department and director of the Mathematics and Statistics Research Center from 1983-1995. He described his unusual leadership approach as follows:

It has always been my philosophy, maybe somewhat to the dismay of my management, that my priorities were people first, discipline second, institution third. To me, some of the greatest pleasure is to see people develop, stay out of their way, give them the resources, and let them do their thing.

Under his watch as director, several researchers made fundamental advances: Narendra Karmarkar in interior-point methods in linear programming, Ingrid Daubechies in the theory of wavelets, and Peter Shor in quantum computation. Concurrently with his Bell Labs positions, Ron held visiting professorships at various times at Rutgers University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Princeton University.

When AT&T split into three companies in 1995, Ron was asked to become chief scientist at the newly formed AT&T-Labs Research (an analogue of Bell Labs). In 1999, he decided to move to academia full-time and joined the Computer Science Department at UCSD. Ron was selected by students as “teacher of the year” in 2015, an honor of which he was proud. In addition to his faculty position, he was chief scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

Ron’s research covered a broad spectrum of areas in mathematics and computer science. One of his early papers introduced a worst-case ratio measure for the effect of timing anomalies and established a whole subfield in scheduling theory. In connection with Ramsey theory—which concerns the existence of smaller, well-behaved substructures in combinatorial structures, however disordered—Ron appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for “the highest number appearing in a mathematical proof” (two of his books treated Ramsey theory). In the field of discrete and computational geometry, Ron considered variants of the Steiner problem to find the shortest network of straight-line segments to connect points in a plane, a problem of great practical importance. In fact, Ron delivered the American Mathematical Society’s (AMS) Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture on the Steiner problem in 2001.

An unusual element of Ron’s career was his connection with the famous mathematician Paul Erdős. Ron met Erdős in 1963 at a number theory conference, where Erdős beat him at ping-pong. Ron returned home, improved his table tennis and became Bell Labs champion. He and Erdős eventually authored more than 30 papers together. Erdős was famous as a poser of problems for which he offered monetary prizes for solutions, with each award’s amount matched to the problem’s difficulty

Ron wrote two books—one with Erdős and one with his wife, Fan Chung—that included many of Erdős’ problems in number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. He hosted Erdős at Bell Labs during his East Coast visits and maintained a room for him at his home.

Ron excelled at juggling and gymnastics, and often juggled while presenting lectures to capture the audience’s attention. Photo courtesy of Ché Graham.
 Ron was a natural leader in the scientific community. In 1993, he won the first-ever contested election as president of the AMS. He was also elected president of the Mathematical Association of America in 2003.

Over the course of his life, Ron authored six books and wrote more than 400 papers (over 100 of which were coauthored with Fan Chung). A partial list of his areas of interest includes number theory, graph theory, Ramsey theory, discrete and computational geometry, and packing and scheduling. Ron also initiated work in approximation algorithms for the field of theoretical computer science. His efforts helped to establish the significance of discrete mathematics, which became increasingly important in communication and computer science during his career.

Ron excelled at juggling and gymnastics throughout his life, inspired by an Acrotheater class by E.F (“Bud”) Beyer at the University of Chicago that combined dance, circus arts, and gymnastics. As a graduate student at Berkeley, he earned money by juggling and trampolining in a group called the Bouncing Baers. Ron became president of the International Juggler’s association in 1972; he observed that juggling embodies a physical form of mathematics through a physical notion of order in time and space. He was known for giving compelling talks that captured and held the audience’s attention by juggling while presenting mathematical content in unexpected ways. Ron wrote several mathematical papers that analyzed juggling drops and descents. As a metaphor for life, he later said that “Life is juggling.”

On the national and international scenes, Ron was a spokesperson for discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science — for both the scientific community and the general public. He coauthored a book entitled Magical Mathematics with Persi Diaconis in 2011, which explained magic tricks whose mechanisms relied on mathematical ideas.

SIAM awarded Ron with the first George Pólya Prize in Applied Combinatorics in 1971 for his work in Ramsey theory; he shared the prize with four other Ramsey theory pioneers. In 2009, Ron was named a SIAM Fellow.

Ron was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985 and served as treasurer from 1996 to 2008. In 2003, the AMS presented him with the Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement “for being one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics.” Upon receiving the prize, Ron said, “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love doing mathematics, and that desire has not dimmed over the years (yet!)”

Indeed, Ron loved mathematics and worked on it up to his very last day.


More information on Ron’s life can be found in his MacTutor biography, on Wikipedia, and on a UCSD information page.

Jeffrey C. Lagarias is the Harold Mead Stark Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. He worked in the Mathematical Research Center at Bell Laboratories in Ron Graham’s department beginning in 1980, and under his leadership at AT&T Labs-Research until 1999.

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