Biography:Jacob E. Goodman

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Short description: American geometer (1933–2021)
Jacob E. Goodman
Born(1933-11-15)November 15, 1933
Lynn, Massachusetts
DiedOctober 10, 2021(2021-10-10) (aged 87)
San Rafael, California
NationalityAmerican
Alma materNew York University
Columbia University
AwardsFellow of the American Mathematical Society (2012)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics, Music
InstitutionsCity College of New York
Doctoral advisorHeisuke Hironaka[1]

Jacob Eli Goodman (November 15, 1933 – October 10, 2021[2]) was an American geometer who spent most of his career at the City College of New York, where he was professor emeritus.[3]

Research

Together, he and Richard M. Pollack, his long-term collaborator, introduced concepts such as "allowable sequences of permutations" and "wiring diagrams",[4] which have played an important role in discrete geometry, specifically in the study of arrangements of pseudolines and (more generally) oriented matroids. His work with Pollack includes such results as the first nontrivial bounds on the number of order types of polytopes,[5] and a generalization of the Hadwiger transversal theorem to higher dimensions.[6] He and Pollack were the founding editors of the journal Discrete & Computational Geometry.[7]

Goodman was the originator of the "pancake problem", an elementary question on permutations which he published under the pseudonym Harry Dweighter.[8][9] The problem gave rise to the concept of pancake sorting.[9][10][11]

Goodman co-edited the book Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry with Joseph O'Rourke.[12]

Music

In 1999, Goodman returned to an old love, musical composition, and in 2002 was founding president of the New York Composers Circle.[13][14]

Awards

In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[15]

Selected publications

  • Dweighter, Harry; Garey, Michael R.; Johnson, David S.; Lin, Shen (1977), "Solutions of Elementary Problem E2569", American Mathematical Monthly 84: 296, doi:10.2307/2318878 .
  • Goodman, Jacob E. (1980), "Proof of a conjecture of Burr, Grünbaum, and Sloane", Discrete Mathematics 32: 27–35, doi:10.1016/0012-365x(80)90096-5 .
  • Goodman, Jacob E. (1983), "Multidimensional sorting", SIAM Journal on Computing 12 (3): 484–507, doi:10.1137/0212032 .
  • Goodman, Jacob E. (1984), "Semispaces of configurations, cell complexes of arrangements", Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A 37 (3): 257–293, doi:10.1016/0097-3165(84)90050-5 .
  • Goodman, Jacob E. (1995), "Foundations of a theory of convexity on affine Grassmann manifolds", Mathematika 42 (2): 305–328, doi:10.1112/s0025579300014613 .
  • Goodman, Jacob E. (1990), "The intrinsic spread of a configuration in R^d", Journal of the American Mathematical Society 3: 639–651, doi:10.1090/s0894-0347-1990-1046181-2 
  • Cappell, Sylvain; Goodman, Jacob E. (1994), "Common tangents and common transversals", Advances in Mathematics 106 (2): 198–215, doi:10.1006/aima.1994.1056 .
  • Surveys on Discrete and Computational Geometry: Twenty Years Later, Contemporary Mathematics, 453, American Mathematical Society, 2008 .

References

  1. ↑ Jacob Eli Goodman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ "Jacob E. Goodman". New York Composers Circle. http://www.nycomposerscircle.org/composers/Goodman/Goodman2.html. 
  3. ↑ "Department of Mathematics, CCNY --- People". http://math.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/person/list. 
  4. ↑ Bjorner, Anders (1999), Oriented Matroids, 2nd Ed., Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, 46, Cambridge University Press 
  5. ↑ Goodman, Jacob E. (1986), "There are asymptotically far fewer polytopes than we thought", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 46: 127–129, doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1986-15415-7 
  6. ↑ Goodman, Jacob E. (1988), "Hadwiger's transversal theorem in higher dimensions", Journal of the American Mathematical Society (1): 301–309 
  7. ↑ "Discrete & Computational Geometry". Springer Science+Business Media. https://www.springer.com/journal/454/editors. Retrieved November 17, 2021. 
  8. ↑ Dweighter, Harry (1975), "Elementary Problem E2569", American Mathematical Monthly 82: 1010, doi:10.2307/2318260 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Singh, Simon (November 14, 2013). "Flipping pancakes with mathematics". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/nov/14/flipping-pancakes-mathematics-jacob-goodman. 
  10. ↑ "Improved Pancake Sorting". http://www.maa.org/mathtourist/mathtourist_10_9_08.html. 
  11. ↑ "Pancake Sorting". http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PancakeSorting.html. 
  12. ↑ Goodman, Jacob E.; O'Rourke, Joseph (2004), Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry, Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, 2nd Ed., 46, CRC Press 
  13. ↑ "About NYCC". http://nycomposerscircle.org/about. 
  14. ↑ "Jacob E. Goodman - New York Composers Circle". http://www.nycomposerscircle.org/composers/Goodman/Goodman2.html. 
  15. ↑ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-01-19.



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