Biography:Frank Garvan

From HandWiki
Short description: Australian-born mathematician (born 1955)

Francis G. Garvan (born March 9, 1955) is an Australian-born mathematician who specializes in number theory and combinatorics. He holds the position Professor of Mathematics at the University of Florida.[1] He received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University (January, 1986) with George E. Andrews as his thesis advisor.[2] Garvan's thesis, Generalizations of Dyson's rank, concerned the rank of a partition[3] and formed the groundwork for several of his later papers.[4]

Garvan is well-known for his work in the fields of q-series and integer partitions. Most famously, in 1988, Garvan and Andrews discovered a definition of the crank of a partition.[5] The crank of a partition is an elusive combinatorial statistic similar to the rank of a partition which provides a key to the study of Ramanujan congruences in partition theory. It was first described by Freeman Dyson in a paper on ranks for the journal Eureka in 1944.[6] Andrews and Garvan's definition was the first definition of a crank to satisfy the properties hypothesized for it in Dyson's paper.

References

  1. "CURRICULUM VITAE: Francis G. Garvan". July 18, 2016. http://www.qseries.org/fgarvan/current-vita.pdf. 
  2. "George Andrews' Students". http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~asills/geastudents.html. 
  3. Garvan, Francis G. (May 1986). "1". Generalizations of Dyson's rank (Thesis). Retrieved 2019-03-22.
  4. Garvan, Francis G.. "Frank Garvan: List of Publications". http://www.qseries.org/fgarvan/publist.html. 
  5. Askey, Richard (1999). "The work of George Andrews: a Madison perspective". Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire 42: Art. B42b, 24pp. https://www.emis.de/journals/SLC/wpapers/s42askey.pdf. 
  6. Dyson, Freeman J. (1944). "Some Guesses in The Theory of Partitions". Eureka (Cambridge) 8: 10–15. ISBN 9780821805619. https://books.google.com/books?id=nnyNUidX1OMC&pg=PA51. 

External links