Biography:Gabriel Andrew Dirac
Gabriel Andrew Dirac | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | July 20, 1984 Arlesheim | (aged 59)
Education | Ph.D. |
Alma mater | University of London |
Known for | Graph theory |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of Aarhus, Trinity College Dublin |
Doctoral advisor | Richard Rado |
Gabriel Andrew Dirac (13 March 1925 – 20 July 1984) was a mathematician who mainly worked in graph theory. He stated a sufficient condition for a graph to contain a Hamiltonian circuit. In 1951 he conjectured that n points in the plane, not all collinear, must span at least [n/2] two-point lines, where [x] is the largest integer not exceeding x. This conjecture was proven true when n is sufficiently large by Green and Tao in 2012.[1]
Education
Dirac received his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of London under Richard Rado.[2]
Career
Dirac was professor of mathematics in the University of Aarhus in Denmark , and was also Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics (1962) at Trinity College Dublin in the mid-1960s.
Family
He was the stepson of Paul Dirac, who adopted him after marrying his mother Manci, and the nephew of Eugene Wigner. His biological father is Richard Balazs, and he had an older sister, and two younger half-sisters.
See also
- Dirac's theorem on Hamiltonian cycles
- Dirac's theorem on chordal graphs
- Dirac's theorem on cycles in k-connected graphs
Notes
- ↑ Green, Ben; Tao, Terence (2012-08-23). "On sets defining few ordinary lines". arXiv:1208.4714 [math.CO].
- ↑ Gabriel Andrew Dirac at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
References
- L. Døvling Andersen, I. Tafteberg Jakobsen, C. Thomassen, B. Toft, and P. Vestergaard (eds.), Graph Theory in Memory of G.A. Dirac, North-Holland, 1989. ISBN:0-444-87129-2.