Fan chung graham biography of martin

But I do not want people to respect me because of that power.

Fan chung graham biography of martin

I'd rather win their admiration because of the mathematics I'm doing. In , she was one of the first to receive a Bellcore university fellowship, a sabbatical she spent at Harvard university. After twenty years of work at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore , Chung decided to go back to the University of Pennsylvania to become a professor of mathematics.

Beyond her contributions to graph theory, Chung has used her knowledge to connect different fields of science. As she wrote in "Graph Theory in the Information Age",. Chung's life was profiled in the documentary film Girls who fell in love with Math. In , she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Chung has two children; the first child was born during her graduate studies from her first marriage.

Fan Chung's first marriage ended in divorce in However, when she worked at Bell Laboratories , she met Ronald Graham. During that time, they became close friends and published many joint papers in graph theory, eventually marrying in She was married to him until his death in Among Fan Chung's publications, her contributions to spectral graph theory are important to this area of graph theory.

From the first publications about undirected graphs to recent publications about directed graphs, Fan Chung creates the solid base in the spectral graph theory to the future graph theorist. Spectral graph theory, as one of the most important theories in graph theory, combines the algebra and graph perfectly. Historically, algebraic methods treat many types of graphs efficiently.

Her work initiated a geometric approach to spectral graph theory with connections to differential geometry. According to the biography Fan Rong K Chung Graham , "Spectral graph theory studies how the spectrum of the Laplacian of a graph is related to its combinatorial properties. This book became a standard textbook at many universities and is the key to study spectral graph theory for many mathematics students who are interested in this area.

Chung's work in random graph models shed new light on the field of network science. Many real-world large information networks such as Internet Graphs, Call Graphs, and collaboration graphs have been observed to be well approximated by a power law distribution. Chung's work in the Chung-Lu model, pioneered the theory of treating random graphs with arbitrary degree distributions, including the power law graphs.

Her work provides a solid framework for quantitative and rigorous analysis for modeling and analyzing large complex networks. It also often serves as a popular benchmark for comparing new graph models in network science. Fan Chung, together with Ronald Graham and Richard Wilson , introduced a strong notion of equivalence among graph properties through the control of error bounds and developed the theory of quasi-random graphs.

In a series of research papers with several coauthors , she showed that a large family of graph properties is equivalent in the sense that if a graph satisfies any one of the properties, it must satisfy all of them. The set of equivalent quasi-random properties includes a surprisingly diverse collection of properties, and therefore provides efficient methods for validating graph properties.

Many but not all random graph properties are quasi-random. The notion of quasi-randomness has been extended to many other combinatorial structures, such as sequences, tournaments, hypergraphs and graph limits. In general, the theory of quasi-randomness gives a rigorous approach to 'random-like' or 'pseudorandom' alternatives. A basic question in extremal graph theory is to find unavoidable patterns and structures in graphs with given density or distribution.

A complementary problem is to find a smallest graph which contains every member of a given family of graphs as subgraphs. With several coauthors, she also derived many elegant and surprising results on universal graphs. Her fundamental contributions in these areas of extremal graph theory have many applications in parallel computations. Contents move to sidebar hide.

Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. In that area she has found a number of graph-theoretic statistics and some arresting connections with the Riemann zeta function. For the 20 years following her doctoral studies, she held research positions at Bell Labs and Bellcore, where she headed the Mathematics, Information Sciences and Operations Research Division and directed research groups in combinatorics, algorithms, cryptography, and optimization.

At Bell, Fan met and collaborated with many research scientists and mathematicians, including Ronald L. Graham who was to become her husband. At Bell, Fan developed and honed her talent for making connections with seemingly disparate areas of mathematics and the sciences and with the practitioners of those disciplines. She visited Harvard University in as a Bellcore Fellow and a few years later returned to academia.

Chung has been awarded numerous honors and awards for her groundbreaking work in spectral graph theory, discrete geometry, algorithms, and communications networks. She has written over papers with about coauthors. Graham In Chung graduated with a Ph. She was appointed and she began working under Henry Pollak who would be her superior at Bell Laboratories for many years.

There were many other leading mathematicians working for Bell Laboratories at this time such as Ron Graham and Sloane. She quickly began to collaborate with others at Bell Labs and produced a steady stream of mathematical papers [ 2 ] :- Finding the right problem is often the main part of the work in establishing the connection. Frequently a good problem from someone else will give you a push in the right direction and the next thing you know you have another good problem.

You make mathematical friends and share the fun! In she published Optimal rearrangeable graphs in which she gave a method of finding the minimum number of edges a rearrangeable graph may have for any choice of nonempty subsets of its vertex set. A Kandel, reviewing this paper wrote:- This contribution is quite relevant to applied problems, since many problems in switching networks can be viewed in graph-theoretic terms.

For example, instead of minimizing the number of crosspoints to reduce the cost of the network, one can consider the problem of finding a graph with the minimal number of edges. Also in Chung published her first joint paper with Ron Graham On multicolor Ramsey numbers for complete bipartite graphs which appeared in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory.

While working at Bell Laboratories, Chung became pregnant again [ 2 ] :- I told [ Henry Pollak, my manager ] that I would work until the day I went to the hospital. Since I already had one at home, I thought what's the problem with one more? I didn't even take maternity leave; there was too much paperwork associated with that. So I just took four weeks vacation and wrote one paper in between.

Her second child was born in but Chung's marriage was not a successful one and it ended in divorce in She would marry Ron Graham in but she continued to publish under her original name of Fan Chung. Graham has said see [ 1 ] :- Many mathematicians would hate to marry someone in the profession. They fear their relationship would be too competitive.

In our case, not only are we both mathematicians, we both do work in the same areas. So we can understand and appreciate what the other is working on, and we can work on things together-and sometimes make good progress. In the Bell Telephone Company was split up. Bellcore Bell Communications Research , and other companies, was set up and Henry Pollak became head of a research unit within the newly formed company at Morristown, New Jersey.

He asked Chung to become Research Manager and help him develop the unit:- For the next seven years, in addition to my research, I had to write reports, attend meetings, and read the research papers of mathematicians I supervised. She was promoted to Division Manager of Mathematics, Informations Sciences and Operations Research at Bellcore in , a post she held for four years.

In the autumn of Chung became a visiting professor at Princeton. It marked the beginning of a new association with the academic world. In Bellcore created the idea of a Fellow who would spend a sabbatical at a university. Chung was one of the first to receive such a Fellowship and she went to Harvard:- It is not easy for some people to leave management, but it was not so hard for me.

Usually with positions in management you obtain more influence and you certainly have more power to make decisions. But I do not want people to respect me because of that power. I'd rather win their admiration because of the mathematics I'm doing. This year was to have a huge influence on Chung who decided to return to the academic world but she did not formally leave Bellcore until In , however, she became a visiting professor at the Mathematics Department at Harvard University.