Fred S. Roberts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fred Stephen Roberts (born June 19, 1943)[1] is an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, and a former director of DIMACS.
Roberts did his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College,[1] and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1968; his doctoral advisor was Dana Scott.[2] After holding positions at the University of Pennsylvania, RAND, and the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the Rutgers faculty in 1972.[1]
He has been vice president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics twice, in 1984 and 1986, and has been director of DIMACS since 1996.[1]
Research
Roberts' research concerns graph theory and combinatorics, and their applications in modeling problems in the social sciences and biology.[1] Among his contributions to pure mathematics, he is known for introducing the concept of boxicity, the minimum dimension needed to represent a given undirected graph as an intersection graph of axis-parallel boxes.[3]
Books
Roberts is the author or co-author of the following books:[4]
- Discrete Mathematical Models, with Applications to Social, Biological and Environmental Problems, Prentice-Hall, 1976, ISBN 978-0-13-214171-0. Russian translation, Nauka, 1986.
- Graph Theory and its Applications to the Problems of Society, CBMS-NSF Regional Conference Series in Applied Mathematics 29, SIAM, 1987, ISBN 978-0-89871-026-7.
- Measurement Theory, with Applications to Decisionmaking, Utility, and the Social Sciences, Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications 7, Addison-Wesley, 1979, ISBN 978-0-201-13506-0.[5] Reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- Applied Combinatorics, Prentice-Hall, 1984. 2nd edition (with B. Tesman), 2004, ISBN 978-0-13-079603-5. 3rd edition, Chapman & Hall, 2009. Chinese translation, Pearson Education Asia, 2005 and 2007.
He is also the editor of nearly 20 edited volumes.[6]
